Operational Resilience: Critical Services, Tolerances and Assurance
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Use a disruption scenario to assess whether a critical service could resume within its agreed tolerance. Consider when work actually resumes as well as when the system returns.
In the course case, processing may be interrupted for at most four hours. The system returns after three, but without a staff handover work resumes only after six. Assess the evidence, explain the breach and develop a handover measure. Reassess the plan when staffing shifts change.
Take away a service test package with assessed scenarios and test instructions to support the next review of minimum service, dependencies and tolerance.
What you will work on
You define three to five critical services and justify their priority by customer impact, business process and binding commitments.
You justify proposed disruption limits for prioritised services, distinguish them from recovery objectives and identify dependencies that threaten those limits.
You distinguish timely system recovery from actual service delivery.
Who it is for
Risk management
Operations and service owners
Resilience and business continuity leads
Topics
Critical services and value creation: scoping by customer, process and contractual impact
Harm-based disruption limits and recovery objectives; distinct UK and Australian application concepts
Dependency mapping: people, technology, sites, suppliers and shared resources
Stress testing and scenarios: outage, partial failure, recovery and learning points
Assurance evidence: assumptions, open issues and a decision paper for governance bodies
Workaround and recovery strategies: prioritisation, residual risk and limits to continuation
Your result
Your service test package contains assessed disruption scenarios and test instructions. Use it to check minimum service and dependencies against the agreed tolerance.
Prerequisites
Experience with responsibility for risk, operations or resilience, and access to service, process or contract information from your own organisation. If reliable data is missing or confidential, you work on an example case and record the transfer as an open task.
Format and approach
Planned self-study with 12–16 hours of work, templates, an annotated example and self-checks. The test plan prepares subsequent organisational testing.
What needs to recover first after a disruption? You examine the services in an area and explain the recovery order to colleagues in operations, IT and finance. You create a business impact analysis for your organisation or a course case.
Which service must your organisation sustain under pressure? Examine what that service depends on, what preparations already exist and where improvements are needed. Develop a resilience diagnosis, a 90-day plan for your area and a brief for the next management decision.
IT recovery objectives need to match business requirements and provider capabilities. Develop a recovery plan for one IT service: what comes first, what does the service depend on, who approves its use and how will recovery be tested? Use it to prepare discussions with IT leadership, business teams and continuity management.
