Business Continuity Planning – Lessons Learned

The COVID-19 pandemic has created strife across the globe. Many families have suffered from illness, the loss of a loved one, loss of employment, and in some cases maybe a loss of hope in a way forward back to normal. While many businesses have been shuttered others deemed critical or those that operate virtually may be thriving. Assuming your business is operating, have you been able to operate effectively and efficiently? 

Some businesses are benefitting from their consumers being shut in, leading to increased online video and music consumption, people using at home time to learn a new skill, hobbyist expanding their knowledge base. All that aside, in order to operate virtually a business must have at a minimum an appropriate technology infrastructure and a business continuity plan that considers workflows.

Maybe you moved your business operations to the cloud so that all you applications are hosted in some remote data center and not your office space. Maybe you had a plan in place. Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, WA treated patient number one in the US. They had a pandemic plan, had recently tested it, felt confident but when the pandemic hit they realized they didn’t have enough critical supplies and were scrambling for personal protective equipment, PPE. Additionally, defective test kits provided by the CDC were also a major problem. This story played out throughout Washington State, the country and world.

Some business may have segments or divisions that were able to operate just fine while other segments were shutdown. Content providers such as Netflix or Disney have had no problem providing streaming services and supporting end users watching TV shows, movies and documentaries. However, their content creation businesses that produce new movies and shows have been shuttered. Even with the best planning and infrastructure in place, market dynamics have had a huge impact on business operations.

Assuming you have been able to provide your service virtually or were deemed critical and allowed to remain open, having employees isolated at home has had its problems. I personally needed equipment and what normally would take no more than 2 days took over 2 weeks to connect, get advice and place an order. The company was operating virtually and demand was at all time highs and their technology infrastructure did not support their business process remotely as it did when employees worked onsite.

So what have we learned? For me the biggest difficulty was to have imagined the scenario we all faced. This event was beyond many organization’s planning. Perhaps many of the behemoths got it right, or scrambled to make things work. The largest obstacle perhaps was getting the business processes right when forced to operate remotely with employees in isolation. Difficulties collaborating with colleagues, maintaining business workflows, and operating efficiently are among the largest hurdles that virtually operating businesses have had to deal with. This pandemic will certainly impact business continuity planning for many years to come.

So what can we do to be better prepared for other unanticipated disruptions? A framework is important to getting things right for all business continuity planning. Below is a simplified 5 step approach.

1. Develop a plan – Assemble a team, identify outage scenarios and goals. List what services must function as soon as possible, and what other functions can wait.
2. Establish business operations workflows – Define how various departments and staff function both independently and cross functionally. Identify how the business operates with staff in isolation or at remote locations. Identify logistical moves of personnel that could be made today which would support business recovery plans in the future. Some firms such as Facebook are already defining work from home positions. Establishing work from home positions could potentially boost employee productivity and reduce company costs.
3. Define the technology – Identify the services and infrastructure necessary to support the plan, as well as what other technologies could improve efficiencies or resilience. Identify potential logistical technology moves that might better protect the company, i.e. cloud computing and services.
4. Brainstorm potential pitfalls – Ask what are we missing, identify the what ifs….
5. Test the plan – Testing can help identify gaps in planning. After testing assess what worked well, and where expectations fell short. Identify the necessary changes and retest.

Network Management Solutions has been assisting companies since 1996 to design, implement, monitor and mange IT infrastructure. We have helped companies recover from failed projects, security breaches and outages. Contact NMS for a free, confidential, consultation to understand how we may contribute to your business ongoing businesses success.