Have you created a business continuity plan?

Lindsey,

Working on it now, will let you know in a few months how it has come along.

Are you looking for assistance in yours, or is it general market research?

Thanks

Lindsey: What a great question! You focus on natural disasters, but how many organizations had no contingency plan in place when the financial crisis hit? I spent countless hours/days/weeks watching businesses flounder because they had no idea what to do as volumes or sales plunged. And very frequently they did the wrong thing. I don't know of any sample templates to follow. What I did was use the business plan format as a checklist.

Lindsey,

My local area was under the threat of natural disaster last fall and business continuity was a top priority for all of us. Luckily, the Army Corps of Engineering fixed the dam preventing what could have been the destruction of thousands of homes and businesses. At the time, I found some great resources for disaster planning and wrote about them in my blog :

http://selahsynergy.com/blog1/2009/09/08/small-business-disaster-planning/

Although some of the resources are targeted to small business, the same principles apply to larger organizations. From past experience, I know there are some great organizations who host training and conferences about disaster recovery, specifically geared towards large mainframe shops who may need to mirror computer operations at an off-site data center. The Disaster Recovery Journal at http://www.drj.com/ is one such source of information.

Best,

Susan

Hi Lindsey. To answer your questions thoroughly would require significant typing time. I have been in the business contingency planning industry for 9 years and have lots of great information that can help you and your team. You are welcome to contact me directly. I would be glad to help you and your team get things started and provide some information that will give you a decent roadmap to follow. No sales pitches or unwarranted expectations. I am here to help and be an expert resource. My desktop line is; 818-510-4939. My office is in Los Angeles (Sherman Oaks, Ca).
Thanks!
James.

Lindsey,

Great question. There are a lot of templates and questionnaires out there - DRI and other sites offer many useful resources. Systems can be made resilient to help the business survive and work through a disaster. However, there are two key learnings from my experience.

First, how to handle a situation where nothing is physically destroyed, but employees are not able to get to access facilities (think pandemic) where they need to work. Your system must enable people to remotely access systems and continue serving your customers.

Second, much of the focus in business continuity planning revolves around physical assets and their single points of failure. The point to remember is that people can be single points of failure too. If you have key personnel with critical knowledge which is locked in their brains - knowledge which you desperately need during a crisis, but is unavailable because the people are unavailable, then it can have the same effect as if you had a loss of physical resources.

Feel free to contact me (kpnaidu@gmail.com) if you want to chat more about this.

KP

Hello Lindsey,

I have created two BCPs in the past few years and I am currently working with a customer to help them implement a near self service version because they don't have the resources to work with their thousands of suppliers. As James Meyers stated above, it would require too much typing to answer you adequately. But if you would like another perspective on this topic, you can look up my contact info or call me at 617-999-7613. I work out of the Boston, MA area.

Good Luck on your BCP!
Ian

Very timely question! I would venture the majority of businesses may have some type of continuity plan in place, however they are way out of date. The plan must cover financial aspects of the business to include partner and key person insurance, buy-out options as well as data preservation and 10-year+ plans. Keeping a company going when everything goes horribly wrong.

We have a bare bones Business Continuity Plan, but am in the process of creating a Disaster Recovery plan for the recovery priority of our Business Software Apps (which in a mining company is extensive).

Every one should have the basics of how to restore or recover systems should they go down (either individually or together).

Also key personnel and external suppliers.

I find the problem is the non IT related stuff that gets ignored as the business has a 'she'll be right' attitude. So it's more of an arse covering exercise for me.

We have experience creating business continuity plans and disaster recovery plans. Some of the key things to consider is the type of business...The critical processes and the effective chain of command. The key actors both within the company and externally. You also may want to consider the types of crisis that may impact your business.

If we can offer any assistance in this effort, please feel free to contact me personally at (203) 404-3974 or write to me at jrosen@rospro.com.

All the best,

Jason