Archive for the ‘Business Continuity Maintenance’ Category

Embedding Business Continuity Management into your organisation’s culture

Thursday, November 25th, 2010

Your business continuity and IT disaster recovery plans are living documents that need to continually evolve otherwise they will stagnate. If you maintain and exercise your plan it will evolve along with your organisation, helping you to be prepared should a business interruption strike.

Here are OpsCentre’s top 5 tips on how to keep the Business Continuity Plan alive in your organisation.

  1. Business Continuity needs a senior sponsor that has the authority and influence to establish the priority of BCP for the organisation. Get BCP on the agenda for Road Shows and Strategic Planning sessions that the Executive presents.
  2. Ensure that impacts upon Business Continuity Strategy are considered when assessing the business case for all new projects. Not just IT projects but business ones as well such as implementing new products, services or business locations. Ensure that any changes required to the business continuity strategy, for example extra seats at a recovery site, are included when you cost out the new project. You can also include reviewing the BIA and updating the recovery procedures for the affected business units as activities in the project.  Update your business case templates and change request templates to prompt for these considerations up front.
  3. Include a BCP awareness package in the induction training for all new staff.
  4. Include business continuity ‘roles’ in position descriptions, workplans and KPI’s.
  5. Exercise and Test your plan every year at a minimum. Testing is not a pass or fail exercise, it helps to refine your plan and provides an excellent opportunity for staff to gain familiarity with their business continuity roles and the continuity strategies. It doesn’t have to be boring, business continuity can be an interesting, fun, team building event. 

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Posted in Business Case, Business Continuity, Business Continuity Maintenance, Business Continuity Testing, Business Resilience | No Comments »

7 Habits of Highly Effective Business Continuity

Friday, January 29th, 2010

1. The Senior Executive actively supports Business Continuity

The CEO\Director\General Manager that believes in and wants a functional Business Continuity program in place is a critical success factor.

To have a senior Executive that is responsible for setting the priorities and vision for the organisation to stand behind BCP and communicate this to the staff is a powerful change motivator. 

2. A Whole of Business Approach

A business continuity program that prioritises the organisation from the Executive’s birdseye perspective as well as analysing business impacts across all business functions in a consistent manner will lead to a better informed business continuity strategy being proposed. It allows the Executive to see the requirements of the business in a single snapshot and make a cost benefit justified decision on the level of continuity required.

3. A Single Point of Business Continuity Management

Someone needs to be responsible for BCP at an organisational level. It needs to be in their job description and a priority for them, otherwise it runs the risk of falling between the cracks. With one person accountable for co-ordinating, aggregating, monitoring the overall Business Continuity program and reporting to the Executive, the program is more likely to stay visible and maintain momentum.

4. Testing, Testing, Testing

Business Continuity should be viewed as an ongoing continuous improvement program. And as such testing is vital. It highlights flaws and validates assumptions in your business continuity plans, giving opportunity to improve them. Testing builds confidence and competence within the business continuity team as it brings home how the strategy would actually work in a variety of scenarios and how the roles will interrelate. An untested Business Continuity Plan cannot be considered viable.

5. Embedding BCP into job descriptions and procedures

The various BCP roles such as BCP Manager, Command Team Leader, Business Unit Leader, etc should be written into position descriptions so that it is very clear that is a part of the responsibilities of the staff members. Procedures for new projects, business changes and IT changes should include provision for ensuring the change has BCP/ IT Disaster Recovery aspects taken into account. All changes should have an impact analysis conducted that includes impact on BCP/IT Disaster Recovery procedures.

6. Starting on the right foot

An induction training package that briefs new employees on the Business Continuity and Emergency Management strategies and plans in place is a great way to start them off on the right foot, highlighting the importance of this to the organisation.

7. Maintenance

The person responsible as BCP Manager should be tasked with ensuring maintenance of the documentation occurs on a regular basis. Outputs from changes and testing sessions all need to be fed into the plans.  Periodically the BIA should be revisited and organisation’s prioritisations and maximum tolerable outages reviewed.

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Posted in Business Case, Business Continuity, Business Continuity Maintenance, Business Continuity Plan, Business Continuity Testing, Business Impact Analysis, Disaster Recovery | 1 Comment »

Business Continuity Software Benefits

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

Many organisations utilise software to create, support, maintain, distribute and test their Business Continuity Plans and ensure business survival in any emergency. Regardless of size, most companies can benefit greatly from the use of Business Continuity software and many options exist for its implementation and plan maintenance strategies. Some of the direct benefits that Business Continuity software can provide an organisation are as follows:

 • Conducting and automating the business impact analysis (BIA) process

• Applying relational database architectures to manage plan updates quickly and efficiently, keep documentation “alive” and synchronize it with interfacing applications (e.g. automatically updating plan emergency contact lists with employees’ latest contact information when the corporate employee database changes).

• Distributing Business Continuity Plans to each business unit for training, testing and other implementation events

• Providing document-format questionnaires to ensure thorough analysis and response planning.

• Prompt notification to employees of emergency actions to take, according to corporate protocol.

Business continuity software can provide for risk and business impact assessment tools, plan-building tools, databases and collaborative planning tools, emergency notification and incident management tools. A number of vendors offer integrated modules from which to choose. A company’s BCP project may require only one or all types, depending on its current level of BC maturity and the features and scope of its proposed plan. By using such tools, even first-timers can take advantage of the planning methodologies of experienced business continuity planners.

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Posted in Business Continuity Maintenance, Business Continuity Plan, Business Continuity Software, Business Continuity Testing, Business Impact Analysis | 1 Comment »

Is an outdated business continuity plan worse than none at all?

Friday, November 20th, 2009

This is a debatable point but possibly acting upon an outdated strategy will be time, money and energy misspent in recovering something that is incorrect or no longer needed.

Change is inevitable … A plan can easily get out of date as staff turnover, new business units are created or decommissioned,  IT systems are changed, removed or added, risks affecting the business change or the priorities of the business have changed.

Given the resources typically spent to get a BCP in place in the first instance, it makes good sense to undertake some regular maintenance to ensure it stays current. The longer this is put off, the greater the chance that the whole thing will need to be re-visited down the track.

Maintaining the BCP needn’t be hard but it has to be assigned as someone’s specific responsibility and priority.

Nominating a BCP Manager or Co-ordinator is the first step. It is their responsibility to maintain the overview of all of the planning documents and resources in the organization and to ensure they are kept up to date, even if they are delegating tasks to others.

Ensure the BCP Manager is empowered by Senior Management in this role, making sure the stakeholders that may need to be involved know this is an important task they will be asked to participate in.

Determine a frequency for updates that is realistic and achieveable and stick to it. Schedule out review dates ahead of time, put them in stakeholder’s diaries and schedule review meetings well in advance if necessary.

Include BCP and IT DR considerations in the ‘impact analysis’ for all new projects, not just IT but business projects as well. This may mean adding a section into the organisation’s Business Case and IT Change Request templates. New projects should be considered in the light of impact on existing strategies and business continuity provisions. New IT systems should have their IT Disaster Recovery provisions planned for within their business case and implementation projects if necessary so that the new systems are not left without sufficient coverage.

Not all organizations are able to invest in a full-time BCP Manager so instead the responsibility gets tacked on to someone’s existing role, with varying degrees of success.

Business Continuity Management

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Posted in Business Continuity, Business Continuity Maintenance, Business Continuity Testing | No Comments »