If You Fail to Plan You're Planning to Fail

by: Michael Wallace, VP Application Engineering

According to several recent surveys, almost 50% of all businesses that suffer from a disaster and do not have a business continuity plan in place never reopen for business. Is your business prepared to survive if a disaster strikes or will you be out of business? This is the first in a series of articles discussing why any business not planning to fail must have a business continuity plan in place and some tips on getting your plan started.

Why is this important?

The daily struggle of business is to maintain its current operations. We regularly face an onslaught of challenges to keep the business running smoothly. People take vacations, employees resign, heavy snowfall lowers attendance, materials arrive late, and flu sweeps through the office – all seem to conspire to keep our stress level high and the boss on our back.

On top of this, competitive pressures to improve processes and to expand the business into new and better markets burden us. Both of these activities further reduce our resources for addressing the crisis of the moment. And on top of all of this, who has the time to write a massive tome on disaster recovery? Where is the payback? Why should you fool with this at all? We’ve gotten this far without one!

The answers are easy. Yes, you have the time to write the plan or see that it is done. You already have some ideas of what you would do if the office’s electricity or water failed. You know what you would do if the telephones stopped working. Now, would anyone else know what to do if these things happened while you’re on vacation? Would they handle it as efficiently and effectively as you would? These steps need to be written down and made available to others!

The payback is in a more efficient and profitably run business. Think back to problems that arose over the last year. How much time and money did you lose from each crisis? Did you need to fly in technicians to fix a critical machine that expired in the middle of an urgent job? Did your insurance company document weak links in your processes and threaten to raise your rates? Did you try to restore critical computer files only find out that the backup tapes were useless?

Take some of the time you set aside for future disasters and spend it writing the plan. Just the process of re-examining your business processes should pay for the project in improved efficiencies. A well-written plan with proactive mitigation steps should also lower your business continuity insurance. It shows that you are looking at making your business more resilient to misfortune and taking steps to reduce its impact.

The term “disaster” can be used to describe everything from a broken machine to a flattened factory. The real benefit of a business continuity plan is how it forces you to look at the weaknesses in your business tools and processes and to strengthen them before a tragedy occurs. If you think about it, restoring data communications to an office is just a subset to restoring data communications service to an entire floor of an office building. If you have a workable plan for restoring service to the building, you can extract what is needed to restore service to a single floor or a solitary office.

So your disaster plan not only prepares you for doomsday but can easily be used to help you through the occasional catastrophe that strikes all companies. It might be a loss of electrical power, loss of a critical machine or any number of things. With a well thought out plan, your downtime will be less and your gray hairs fewer.

How do I get started??

You will find the primary components of a business continuity plan scattered about in files, notebooks, sticky notes and personal phone directories. The first thing is to move this knowledge from file drawers and desk calendars into a centralized document. This document must use a standard format and be readily accessible to anyone who needs it. It must be general enough to be quickly reviewed but detailed enough that action can be taken immediately.

Business continuity plans are really nothing new to your life. They are grounded on basic actions you do on a daily basis. In fact, these actions are considered so normal that you probably don’t even think of why you do them. These actions fall into three general classes – mitigation, avoidance and transference.

Mitigation is something you do to reduce the likelihood of occurrence or the amount of damage caused by an event that you could not avoid.
Avoidance is something you do to steer clear of an event.
Transference is to shift your risk of an uncontrolled event to a third party.

For example, if you owned a grocery store, you can mitigate the slowdown in business due to a snowstorm by buying your own snowplow to clean your parking lot. You avoid all damage from a snowstorm by moving your business to the Bahamas. You can transfer the risk of financial loss from flooding by purchasing insurance.

There are many benefits to be gained just by developing the plan. The immediate benefit will be to highlight all of the areas of exposure in your organization:

It will identify single points of failure, such as obsolete technology that cannot be replaced on a failure. This information should drive projects and capital spending to provide redundant equipment and process pathways when practical. Single points of failure should be prioritized and their mitigation costs estimated as input to your next capital budget planning session. If nothing else, at least this list highlights your business process vulnerabilities.
It will show which pieces of equipment are vital at which times. If your AS/400 must be rebooted over lunchtime, what departments must be notified? Whose vital processes run at that time? Do you know? How quickly could you find out? This list illustrates the impact of each device on your users.
It will provide information on what to do when disaster strikes and key people are not available. You need to publish these instructions. Then the people on the scene will know what to do to contain the damage until the key recovery people arrive.

A business continuity plan details the action steps to be taken when the unexpected hits. It contains specific details of who does what, when and very importantly – how. A business continuity plan tells people who are not intimately familiar with a process, technology or event, what to do. It also provides essential information for quickly rebuilding a process or technology that has been completely destroyed.

At most companies, the business continuity plan is the “ugly stepchild” that no one wants to look at or work on. In the business world, the career moving events are building new businesses, rolling out new products and reorganizing companies. There is no glory in writing a plan that may never be used. Yet this plan is your first line of defense in the event of a disaster. Now is the time to change this attitude. All of our lives, we were taught think optimistically. While writing this plan we need to think pessimistically almost to the point of paranoia.

All that said, we use the following steps to build a plan.

Open a business continuity plan project by assigning someone to build the plan and provide necessary resources.
Build an interim plan from readily available business information.
Perform a risk assessment of the actions that have the potential to impact your operation.
Use the risk assessment to develop a business impact analysis; how will these risks impact the business if they occur?
Draft business continuity action plans for what to do when the most likely risks or most damaging events occur. Many of these plans will overlap and can be used for multiple situations.
Develop action plans to avoid or mitigate the most likely risk to your continuing operations
Test your plan regularly; at least annually.

A plan is a wonderful thing but until it is tested and debugged, it should not be relied upon. Testing can be formally done or can be incorporated with other maintenance activities. In either case, the results of using a plan should be recorded. Testing a plan is an excellent way to familiarize your team with your plan and to gain their ideas on improving it.

Go to Top | Return to Newsletter Contents