Prioritise, act, and engage: How transport organisations can accelerate resilience in critical infrastructure services for their customers

In our survey of 360 transport leaders across Europe, we found that disruption is one of the primary motivators behind investment to increase resilience.

Resilient critical infrastructure enables society to function, the economy to grow, and families to connect. Yet as disruption and complexity increases, it’s all too easy for leaders involved in resilient transport infrastructure and operations to get lost in the details. Another common issue is where organisations approach critical infrastructure based on asset or business function, rather than taking a service-led approach.

To avoid this trap and ensure they can see the forest for the trees, leaders can apply a repeatable methodology to each service, such as traffic management, communications, and managing the enterprise. And, in a time of finite resources, you can cut down on time-to-value as you go by acting fast, with focus, and going further by collaborating to scale up the response.

One major national roads infrastructure agency has been doing just this. Their approach allows the organisation to drive synergies in the efforts to increase resilience of critical infrastructure, helping others internally and across the wider supply chain to realise opportunities from transferable measures and deliver greater impact overall. From our partnership work with this client, and from our wider experience of building resilient critical infrastructure, we’ve identified three key steps to take:

1. Focus your efforts where it matters most

From traffic control, to asset maintenance, to resource planning, transport organisations deliver multiple services. Yet rather than trying to improve everything, organisations need to delineate and prioritise those services that have the highest impact on their direct and indirect customers, and on the organisation itself. In short, those which are critical to the safety of their workforce, the public, and the environment, or to the operation and survival of their organisation. 

Understanding ‘what could go wrong’ and its impact is essential to make this distinction. Risk assessments to identify potential risks, threats, and vulnerabilities should be regular exercises – not a one-off event. This ongoing activity helps to establish a robust view on risk exposure, and enables senior management to make informed and evidence-based decisions on where to prioritise investment and effort when resources are limited.

2. Act fast and stick to your action plan throughout 

It’s tempting to look for every answer when you assess your critical services. But perfection is often the enemy of progress. Take action the moment you know your first risk. Creating a hopper of tactical remediation measures with appropriate owners helps to establish momentum and make progress. And it also helps avoid getting lost in the details and lengthy governance processes for other strategic measures that require significant investment.  

It’s also important to implement measures that not only mitigate potential disruptions but also enable long-term efficiency and innovation. From streamlining operations and technology to mitigating technical debt and establishing the right controls, organisations need to think differently to safeguard service quality and safety standards while reducing their financial burden. By enabling a culture of operational excellence and innovation, you can empower those at the heart of critical services to take ownership, and then identify and share creative ways to address vulnerabilities and inefficiencies based on their on-the-ground experience.

3. Engage others to scale up and go further

When resources and funding are limited, collaboration can act as the catalyst to achieve more with less. Sharing the knowledge organisations build up as they explore risks and remediation measures on critical services can help the whole organisation benefit from collective insight. In an increasingly connected disruption environment, it’s likely that challenges in one of the critical services are common to others.

This engagement it’s not about ‘decision by committee'. It should not hinder the pace you act on improving your critical infrastructure. This engagement is about helping others in different parts of the organisation understand the transferable and common findings you have gathered, while offering a platform to go further, faster with their support. While financial numbers for a strategic remediation on a single critical service may not add up, the same remediation at multi-service level could offer significantly higher value for money. Organisations can cut down on duplicate efforts and investments by taking such a collaborative approach. 

How to see the ‘forest and the trees’

Wargaming exercises can help transport organisations make progress across all areas above. In an increasingly connected environment these exercises bring different teams together in simulated situations to explore, test, or stress-test plans and processes for dealing with events. Using scenario-based experiential exercises, organisations can establish a clear picture of risks, threats, and vulnerabilities. Wargaming can also help leaders understand the levers the organisation can pull, helping to implement a command structure trained to lead the appropriate resilience response.

From cyber-attacks to climate change, emerging and evolving challenges require an always-on approach to resilience to make critical infrastructure services available, reliable, and safe for end customers. We typically get lost in the details when complexity increases. Transport organisations need to distinguish those critical services that matter most for their customers to prioritise their efforts and finite resources available. They need to take action early on, drive a collective effort to deliver tangible improvements in critical infrastructure – and, most importantly, sustain these efforts.