Is Your Business continuity plan Usable Right Now?
Is Your Business continuity plan Usable Right Now?
The Business continuity plan for most companies has taken a long time to develop and consumed numerous resources, in dollars and staff time. It is maintained regularly with updated contact lists and team members are required to sign-off that they have read the plan and understand it. The plan document sits in a big red binder in every manager’s office and people even have copies at home.
The plan is tested every year and the objectives have been set so that they are gradually getting more difficult to achieve. You are moving forward to be able to recover more and more of your business during each exercise. Everyone is pleased with the results so far and your team is really experienced. In fact your team is made up of all of the senior people within each department. Most of them actually developed the plan document with your guidance.
But, could your plan actually be used during an emergency to bring the company back to an operational status? Things are not controlled as they are during an exercise. Your senior people may be busy elsewhere during the actual recovery. They may not be available for you to use for other reasons as well.
So now you have inexperienced people trying to use your plan document to actually recover the business. They are under stress and you are getting pressure from the executives to get the business up and running again, just like you do every exercise.
To make the use of your plans a bit easier you need to take a real close look at its organization.
* How is the document organized? Does it have tables and lists of team members, vendors, clients, inventory, call trees and other great information spread throughout the plan?
* Are the actual recovery tasks detailed enough so that someone with a little bit less experience can follow them and restore or recover the technology and business activities?
* Where are the recovery tasks actually located in the document? Are they at the back after pages and pages of company information, the recovery philosophy, schedules and maps? Or are the tasks up front where they should be so that they are readily available and the team members do not have to flip through pages and pages of information that they do not immediately need.
You need to make the tables readily available. They should be indexed and easy to find. Group like tables together so that someone who is from another team can easily find all of the contacts for the team member he is trying to contact in a common area
Get non-expert people to go through the plan recovery steps. If they cannot recover the technology or the business using the steps contained in the plan, go back and re-write the steps. In fact, bring non-expert people into the recovery teams on a regular basis. You will verify the document information and you will also build expertise on the recovery plan outside of your core team.
Many plans that are in use today go to great lengths up front to explain why they where developed, the methodology used, who developed the plans and other background information. They may even have copies of the Business Impact Analysis in them. This is all great information, but it doesn’t belong at the front of the plan document. Put this information into the Appendices.
A well organized plan document can save a lot of time during an actual disaster and can also make the maintenance of the plan easier if it is well designed and the layout is actually usable by those people who will need it after an emergency event.
Business Continuity & Recovery Consulting provides complete Business Continuity Program development to medium sized businesses in all industry fields.
We are independent of all hardware, software and recovery service providers. This independence enables us to give you an unbiased assessment of existing plans and makes sure that we only recommend those services that will actually make your recovery program a success.
