Resilience seems to be the new buzzword in the water industry. This article will help you build resilience without creating a new "fad"within your organisation.

In the current draft methodology for the Water Industry’s PR19 price review one of Ofwat’s key pillars is to ensure that the Water Companies become more resilient in AMP7 and beyond.

Resilience seems to be the new buzzword; there’s a new ISO standard published, UKWIR has commissioned a dedicated Resilience Project, and OFWAT created a Resilience task & finish group to explore the subject….

Why then does Resilience not feel that different to much of the work that management consultants have been trying to achieve for years – organisational strengthening and building business maturity? This article explores the similarities I see between these two subject areas and makes some suggestions around how businesses can build resilience without creating a new “fad” in the organisation.

So what is Resilience?

So, let’s summarise the various definitions I’ve found about Resilience, and specifically how it appears to apply to the Water Industry.

• Ofwat uses a term “resilience in the round” and defines this as requiring:
• Corporate resilience: the ability of an organisation’s governance, accountability and assurance processes to help avoid, cope with, and recover from, disruption; and to anticipate trends and variability in its business operations.
• Financial resilience: an organisation’s ability to avoid, cope with, and recover from, disruption to its finances.
• Operational resilience: the ability of an organisation’s infrastructure, and the skills to run that infrastructure, to avoid, cope with, and recover from, disruption in its performance.
• The Ofwat Water & Wastewater Resilience Action Group (WWRAG) defined resilience as: the ability to cope with, and recover from, disruption, and anticipate trends and variability in order to maintain services for people and protect the natural environment, now and in the future. (Ofwat, ‘Resilience task & finish group’, 2015)
• The UK Government’s Strategic Priorities includes one about securing long term resilience for the water industry.
• The Water Act 2014, states the importance of building resilience from natural hazards such as droughts and floods.
• The recent publication of the ISO standard for Organisational Resilience in May 2017 defines Organisational resilience as “the ability of an organisation to absorb and adapt in a changing environment” (ref. ISO 22316:2017, Clause 3.4, page 1) and lists 20 Management capabilities that together will build different facets of organisational resilience.  Disciplines such as Strategic Planning, Financial management, Human Resource management, Business Continuity Management and Information Security Management are just a few capabilities mentioned.
• The Cabinet Office suggests that resilience is secured through 4 key strategic principles
• Resistance: providing the strength or protection to resist the hazard or its primary impact.
• Reliability: Asset are reliable and can operate under a range of conditions
• Redundancy: The availability of backup installations or spare capacity in the event of disruptions to ensure continuity of services.
• Response and recovery: enabling a fast and effective response to, and recovery from, disruptive events.

What have I learnt from these definitions of Resilience?

Resilience just feels like a new way of saying “you need to build and maintain a robust, mature and agile organisation, underpinned by the right people, an appropriate organisation structure, suitable business processes with appropriate systems, technology and data”.

Resilience just feels like a new way of saying “you need to build and maintain a robust, mature and agile organisation, underpinned by the right people, an appropriate organisation structure, suitable business processes with appropriate systems, technology and data”.

So, isn’t a resilient business one that has an embedded, mature set of well-managed business capabilities? An organisation that understands the capabilities they need, the possible risks to these and has plans to mitigate these risks and unexpected disruptions, to maintain service?

What is a mature business capability?

Let’s look at a standard maturity model for a typical business capability; and look at how this business maturity appears to align with business resilience.

What I’m not saying in this article is that I’ve found the answer to solving Resilience – what I am saying however, is that there is a lot Water Companies and Utilities alike can do to make themselves more resilient without jumping on a “new Resilience bandwagon” and kick-starting yet another initiative.  My suggestion, is that by just concentrating on embedding an organisation’s existing business capabilities so that they can efficiently and effectively manage their finances and deliver operational & service excellence, will get them a long way towards building resilience.

At Leadent, we have significant experience of helping businesses with large field forces become more efficient and effective in managing their operational assets to help them deliver a reliable service to their customers.  Over many years of experience was have developed a specific capability model to help us assess work force management maturity and operational efficiency, and can quickly assess the health of your organisation using our templated health check.

We thrive in helping businesses achieve operational improvement and thus build Resilience. If you’d like to know more about how we can help build and strengthen your operational capabilities then please get in touch.