The operational status of a hydropower dam is described as either satisfactory or unsatisfactory. The ability of existing and proposed hydropower dams to operate satisfactorily under wide range of possible future demands and hydrologic conditions is an important system characteristic that can be assessed by estimating the reliability (the probability that a system will remain in a non-failure state), resilience (the ability of a system to return to non-failure state after a failure has occurred) and vulnerability (the likely damage of a failure event) of the system. The main sources of the data and other useful information for this research were previous research works, government documents, bulletins and gazettes from hydropower related ministries, agencies and organizations. Desktop analysis was carried out to estimate the water requirement to generate power by various combinations of units at the Jebba hydroelectric dam. Linear programming was used to obtain the monthly reservoir releases that maximized annual total energy generation. Both monthly and annual simulations were carried out using the operation policies from the LP optimization algorithm and the generated inflow series. Duration of the failure event (d(j)), the total number of failure events (M) and the deficit volume of the failure event (v(j)) were obtained from the simulation processes and used to evaluate the reliability, resilience and vulnerability of the Jebba dam. The results obtained showed that the performance of Jebba hydropower dam when three or more units are in use is generally poor. The reliability obtained over the period of historical record varied from 0.024 for six units to 0.994 for one unit in use. Reliability based on the optimized operation policy was not less than 60% and was as high as77%. The resilience was 0.292 and vulnerability was 3298.19 Mm3 at 60% reliability. These results confirm that the operational status of the dam can be improved by adopting real time reservoir release policies obtained by optimization of the reservoir operation.