Question

You are a research team working at university admissions and consulting industry. You are assigned to prepare a report to the board of ABC univesity located at Istanbul on how to improve university’s resilience to hazards including natural disasters such as earthquakes.

The university for the last five years have been fueled by international enrollment growth. But the risk of an hazard could change the landscape of university admissions for the foreseeable future.

Your team conducted a health check resilience assessment and the results of the assessment is represented in Fig 1. See Appendix 1 for details of graph calculation.

Fig 1. Resilience Asssessment Results Diagram ating Change ready r attribute Employ m ent Leadership Planning strategies culture Decision making artnership Networks and parnership sattribute Breaking nowledge

Based on the results;

1. Identify and rank the vulnerabilities and strengths of the university from a resilience perspective. What is your recommended strategies and initiatives to develop the university’s resilience capacity?

2. University management has reasonable budget to invest on the best solution. Your target aim is to: - keep the education, classes on, no halt, find a way/channel to continue delivering top quality education - keep all the students wellbeing and staying in Istanbul Related to university’s resilience indicators map above, prepare your sh

Answer 1

The resilience assessment diagram rates the institutions attributes in terms of change readiness, leadership & culture and networks & partnerships. Below are the notable observations.

Change readiness

The institution ranks low on (i) planning stress tests and also (ii) having a common goal of making the premises resilient towards calamities. The first one poses a challenge since in the absence of mock drills and other tools that stresses the system to understand its flaws, concerned authorities will not be aware as to how to react in a real time scenario. The second vulnerability poses a serious challenge since the very first step in creating a business continuity plan is to have all key stakeholders invested in the process.

Leadership & Culture

Key strength in this aspect is decision making skills which makes the institution agile to respond to any adverse change

Network & Partnership Attribute

This attribute has major and related vulnerabilities. Internal resources in terms of knowledge management has a low score. In the lack of significant partnerships, there is low knowledge sharing.

Strategies to be adopted

The institution requires a revision of its business continuity practice model with the first step being having all stakeholders invested in the process. There should be effective collaboration with industry counterparts and affiliated vendors to understand and share best practices. Stress testing is a key method in the entire process which also gives a high score on the parameter of situational awareness.