When Recovery Plans Ignore People
Failover diagrams look complete until the only person who can approve a rollback is offline. People dependencies belong in the same map as systems.
Technology failover is only half of operational resilience. Many fintech incidents stall because approval rights, customer-message ownership, or vendor escalation contacts are unclear after hours.
Include named roles — and deputies — on every critical recovery step. Test whether deputies have access to the tools and credentials the primary uses daily.
Measure time-to-decision separately from time-to-restore. Slow decisions often dominate the customer impact window even when systems recover quickly.
Treat people mapping as audit evidence, not soft culture work. Regulators and counterparties increasingly ask who can act when the primary owner cannot.