Business Continuity Life Cycle - Part 1

Not having a business continuity policy is in itself a threat to your organization.

Developing a business continuity policy begins with gaining a comprehensive understanding of your organization’s business, its operational landscape, responsibilities and other factors that make it commercially viable. Leadership and management teams need to collate the concerns of all interest groups such as stakeholders, shareholders, customers, staff and the local community, based upon which the business continuity policy can be drafted.

Business continuity policies have organization-specific scopes, focus areas and objectives. The health, safety and security of individuals – staff, customers, and interest groups – take precedence over everything else. An impact on the environment as well as the local community can also have repercussions on the organization.

The BCP Steering Committee interfaces between the enterprise’s business continuity program and mainstream business activity.

The BCP Steering Committee is also guided by scope statements, policies and timelines while carrying out their tasks.

Your organization’s BCP Steering Committee should have the right combination of individuals, preferably between five to six members who can collectively take quick and efficient decisions and align business continuity programs with the organization’s strategy.

The BCP Steering Committee should comprise of senior personnel from mission critical divisions of the organization such as operations, finance, sales, HR, IT, facilities & security. The legal and communications department can also be included in this list.

Leadership is an important trait to look for while putting together a BCP Steering Committee. Members should include executives who are involved in operations at the macro level but who can also get involved at the micro level, if required.

There shouldn’t be frequent changes to the list of members on the BCP Steering Committee. Low attrition can ensure an effective business continuity program with a high success rate.

Many of the roles and responsibilities of the BCP Steering Committee overlap with those of the Crisis Management Team (CMT) – the team that manages all the activities during a disruption. Business continuity plans are more successful when there is a high degree of reciprocity between these two teams.

Business continuity and disaster recovery plans are more effective when they are treated as projects with specific goals and objectives against which the performance of plans can be measured.

Research shows that business continuity and disaster recovery projects succeed mainly because of the following factors:

Benefits include budgetary approval, access to infrastructure, staffing support and cutting through bureaucratic red tape. These are vital factors as you’ll need to involve key departments in the company while developing a BCDR Solution.

Challenges include (i) convincing executives on the business need for BCDR, (ii) lack of proper communication and (iii) clearly defined timelines. Leadership and management teams tend to favor project proposals that are business centric and highlight the impact on revenue rather than focus on technicalities.

If leadership and management teams don’t consider a full-fledged BCDR solution feasible, you can still device workarounds by incorporating BCDR concepts into mainstream business processes. For instance, while deploying a new server, application or technology, you can develop resiliency, redundancy and backup procedures that can mitigate operational risks on a daily basis.

People are an important component of any BCDR initiative. Any good BCDR solution clearly differentiates between executive personnel who conceive the plan and those who put them into action. End user engagement through all the BCM lifecycle stages helps in keeping the BCDR solution relevant.

This is an essential quality in a BCDR manager. An able project manager quickly identifies the most relevant methodology that is consistent with your organization’s requirements. Experienced practitioners can even go beyond standard approaches and customize conventional methodologies to optimize output.

Goals and objectives help map the BCDR solution to the operational dimensions of your business. This can save a lot of time, effort and investment. Your BCDR project development activity must cover all functional areas of business. Key personnel from each of these areas are directly involved in the process and define the goals and objectives for their respective functional areas.

Business continuity teams must draft in detail their BCDR requirements during the planning stage to avoid reworks later which lead to losses, errors, time related inefficiencies and more risks.

Clarity and specifics are essential while defining BCDR project prerequisites. For instance, you must clearly define the applications, data, personnel, processes, facilities, customers and so on that are absolutely essential for business continuity in a given scenario.

Your BCDR project requisites can be broadly segregated into three categories:

Defining BCDR project prerequisites must go through several iterations in order to arrive at clearly defined requirements.

BCDR project scope – Your project’s scope establishes the extent to which your BCDR capability can provide business resiliency. Proper scope definition cannot be achieved without tangible project objectives. When the project’s scope is not properly defined, more and more tasks get added and teams don’t know where to draw the line.

Quick turnaround times and short timeframes – Research has demonstrated that the probability of success increases when project timeframes are kept short. This can be achieved by breaking down your BCDR project into a series of sub projects for better management. BCDR development generally tends to run out of steam when projects span over extended periods of time.

Increasing the number of milestones within project timeframes allows managers to constantly gauge progress and take remedial action.

It is easier to gain approval and get employees, teams and departments more readily involved when BCDR projects are executed in phases. However, BCDR managers must ensure that all tasks and activities are clearly mapped to their respective phases, leaving no room for ambiguity.

Process driven approach – Adopting a process driven methodology can be taken for granted if you have an experienced project manager on board. Consistency is crucial and your organization’s choice of project management methodology must be adopted across its entire lifecycle.

Business Continuity Management Life Cycle – Part 2