The past five years have shown condo corporations the importance of quick recovery from unexpected events such as pandemics and flash floods. As a result, condo boards need to embrace sustainable operation plans that help reduce the impact of these events. Here we explain why it’s time for your condo board to achieve operational resilience to create a more sustainable community.

Understanding Operational Resilience

Operational resilience introduces focused initiatives that enable operational continuity. The initiatives are forward-thinking with the goal of reducing risks and avoiding unnecessary disruption for residents and staff. With the right plan in place, your community can act quickly using an emergency plan that protects your assets, residents, and day-to-day life/operations in the building.

Focusing Resources

A sustainable operations plan enables teams to be available at a moment’s notice to conduct emergency response activities based on specific roles. It improves accountability ensuring the right people engage in each step of the plan, with documented processes and assigned roles across your team/service providers.

It also ensures that day-to-day activities are streamlined to reach optimum efficiencies, minimizing disruptions across building operations during an event. Through dependency mapping exercises you identify how individuals interact, the tasks required, and the systems applied to create a logical workflow that enables operational resilience.

Identifying Vulnerabilities

Operational resilience plans identify “reasonably foreseeable consequences” to ensure you have effective responses in place. A perfect example of vulnerabilities are parking garages and elevator shafts exposed to flash flood disasters. In 2018, heavy rain led to life threatening flooding and costly damage in condo parking garages related to overtaxed pipes. Understanding these vulnerabilities allows condo boards to devise plans to help manage water in heavy rain situations resulting from worsening climate change.

Improving Preventative Maintenance Targets and Upgrades

By identifying vulnerabilities, you can improve your preventative maintenance targets and reprioritize building upgrades focused on operational sustainability. For example, a building resiliency assessment identifies climate related hazards for your property. Valuable insights on building conditions and weather-related hazards inform budget allotment decisions as part of a more effective preventative maintenance plan.

Focusing on Restoring Essentials

Whether it’s considering backup generators, having a recovery plan, or improving staff efficiencies to become more responsive, an operational resilience plan allows you to become more strategic when disasters occur. Understanding incident sequencing considers your current system failures and creates a strategy that quickly resumes operating capacity based on system prioritization. You’ll consider the essentials for residents and staff and what actions are required to efficiently restore systems based on those essentials.

Predicting Inter-system Impacts

Operational resilience maps out how system failures create a domino effect. It takes a holistic approach considering system integration and predicting how one failure will likely impact other systems. You can proactively predict what will happen next to prevent further disruptions.

Operational resilience is a positive step that limits the ripple effect of unexpected events both on your residents and budget. You create sustainable operations that allow you to pivot efficiently while limiting disruptions through quicker response times.

The condo experts at CPO Management Inc, a full-service property management company in Toronto and the GTA, have successfully implemented effective operational resilience influenced strategies for high-rise condominium communities. Reach out to us today to learn more about how we can help you realize substantial cost and time savings with our condo services.