Guest blog by Carline James, Allianz Insurance

One thing I've always loved about my career at Allianz is the endless support from our leadership to promote opportunities and ownership of personal development. Having been a Business Analyst (BA) and worked in our Business Analysis Practice Leadership team for close to 10 years I started to consider what a new challenge would look like, spotting a secondment in Business Continuity. Fast forward one year and I'm very happy to share some of my reflections on life in this new world.

"If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions"

Business Analysts (BAs) love a question, they are inquisitive, want to understand the holistic picture of the topic they are engaged on and rely on collaboration with a host of stakeholders across their business. Business Continuity is very much the same and as a leader in this space I've still had to use many of my core skills from my old role to help deliver our Resilience Programme. The team joke (in a friendly way) about my organisation and ability to get into the detail of a topic. But I think we all know you can't perfectly plan when something is going to happen and how that something might unfold when an incident or a crisis do occur. Whilst the plans and frameworks we have in place in Protection and Resilience certainly help control the response activity, the nature of the work can be quite reactive – which is both exciting and scary when you are used to project order! My key takeaway here is that business continuity has given me space to grow in some ways I wasn't expecting, having to flex my style, get a bit more comfortable with uncertainty and go with the flow outside of established ways of working on things.

What's the Requirement?

One of the first big pieces of work I started to tackle was a review of our alternative workspaces in case the office became unavailable. With home working more widely enabled, we needed to review some of our response strategies and there was an opportunity to change them. My BA brain couldn't have been happier when one of my colleagues asked: "What's the requirement here?" There was some comfort in doing some familiar activity! I've learnt masses from my team and their business continuity expertise, guiding some of my thinking around how to structure conversations or how our customers feel about a particular topic. My hope in turn is that I've been able to share some of my change skills, including workshop facilitation, requirements definition and stakeholder messaging to provide mutual benefit as part of the secondment opportunity. The key takeaway here is to make sure you establish what you can give to your new team as well as taking all the fantastic experience being offered.

Personal Resilience in the Resilience World

I think organisationally we've reflected a lot on what it means to be a resilient business and even the personal resilience we've all had to demonstrate since the pandemic. Stepping into this secondment has been a positive challenge of my own personal resilience, moving out of my comfort zone, with new challenges but also new learnings. I'd encourage everyone to take these chances: look sideways, look up… stretch yourself! Since my secondment finished in December, I've taken a permanent role in the team. I am excited for what is ahead and what I can learn from this brilliant new community.