Discussion Week 5(Business Continuity And Disaster Recovery)homework help
Business Continuity And Disaster Recovery homework help
GETTING STARTED
Overview of the Project
Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn’t have to do it himself.
—A. H. WEILER
INTRODUCTION
The job of a business executive requires coordination of the many activities necessary to create a successful business. Markets must be analyzed, potential customers identified, strategies for creating and delivering products and services must be developed, financial goals established and reported, legislative mandates followed, and many different stakeholders satisfied. To ensure that these objectives are met, businesses eventually develop a series of processes designed to produce the desired result. But the world is a dangerous place. Earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, pandemics, snowstorms, fire, and other natural disasters can strike at any time and interrupt these important processes. Terrorism, riots, arson, sabotage, and other human-created disasters can also damage your business. Accidents and equipment failures are guaranteed to happen. As an executive responsible for the well-being of your organization, it is critical that you have a plan in place to ensure that your business can continue its operations after such a disaster and to protect vital operations, facilities, and assets.
You do this just like you do any other important task; you analyze the situation and create a plan. A disaster recovery plan keeps you in business after a disaster by helping to minimize the damage and allowing your organization to recover as quickly as possible. While you can’t prevent every disaster, you can with proper planning mitigate the damage and get back to work quickly and efficiently. The key is having a well-thought-out and up-to-date disaster recovery plan. This chapter will lead you through the creation and implementation of a project plan for creating an effective disaster recovery plan.
Disaster recovery is to recover from a significant disaster, such as a roof collapse in the computer room or a fire in a significant portion of the offices. A disaster almost always requires rebuilding a portion of the business in a recovery area in a very short time. Business continuity, also known as business resilience, involves identifying and mitigating critical machines that may fail. For example, a failure of the database server may close down online customer orders, so a second server is clustered and the disk storage is mirrored to provide redundancy.
THE DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN PROJECT
Building a disaster recovery or business continuity plan is much like any other business project. A formal project management process is necessary to coordinate the various players and company disciplines required to successfully deliver the desired results of the project. This chapter will give you a high-level roadmap of what you should expect as you prepare to lead or manage a disaster recovery project. A sample project plan is included in the companion url accompanying this book. Adapt this chapter and the project plan to fit your business goals, company timeline, and scope of project.
Most projects tend to run in a well-defined sequence. For example, to build a new house, first you clear the land, then build the foundation, then build a floor, and so on. Many things cannot begin until the previous step is completed. A business continuity plan (BCP) project is a bit different. In the project’s early stages, most actions logically follow each other. However, once the basic elements are in place, the project bursts out onto parallel tracks, as each department documents its own area. How you proceed in your company is, of course, determined by your corporate culture, the resources available to work with to complete the process, and the level of visible support from the project’s sponsor. Most business continuity projects follow these steps:
1.An executive within the organization decides that a business continuity plan is needed. This might be due to an auditor’s report or the result of a business disruption that was more financially painful than it would have been if a plan had been in place. Or it could be that an alert employee realized that a good plan did not exist and brought this to the executive’s attention. This executive usually becomes the sponsor for the project.
2.The first (and most important) step that the sponsor takes is to select someone to lead the project. This person is most often called the Business Continuity Manager and is responsible for the successful completion of the project.
3.The project sponsor and the Business Continuity Manager meet to clearly define the scope of the project, the project timeline, and expectations. The Business Continuity Manager must be comfortable that the resources available are adequate to meet all the objectives of the project.
4.The Business Continuity Manager selects the team that will work together to complete the project. Both technical and political considerations are important in selecting a team that can successfully develop a workable business continuity plan.
5.The Business Continuity Manager together with the team now develops the project plan to be used in managing the project. Tasks are identified and assigned, task durations calculated, and activities are sequenced as the project plans are developed.
6.The project plans are executed. The Business Continuity Manager oversees the project as the plan unfolds, keeping everyone focused on completing their tasks and ensuring that milestones are met and that important stakeholders are kept informed as to the project’s progress. It is here where the actual continuity plans for the organization are created.
7.Once the business continuity plans have been developed and tested, the Business Continuity Manager closes the project by making sure that everything was documented properly and handing the project results over to the individual(s) responsible for keeping the plan up to date. Each affected department will usually have someone responsible for keeping their portion of the plan current. A report is also generated for the sponsor recapping the project and documenting lessons learned.
In many organizations, the job of Business Continuity Manager is not taken as seriously as it should be. Management in these organizations only wants you to write something, anything to make the auditors go away. That’s okay because as you build the plan, and as they begin to see the benefits, their interest and support will grow.
A project plan organizes the team so members focus their skills on specific actions to get the job done. This respects their time and brings the project to a prompt, but successful, solution.
INITIATING THE PROJECT
Every project starts with a sponsor. A sponsor should be a person with enough organizational influence to give the project credibility, financing, and strategic direction. The sponsor should also possess the management clout to ensure the willing cooperation of other departments and to ensure that the project is adequately funded. Building a business continuity plan in many cases involves changing people’s attitudes and some of their tried-and-true business processes. Business continuity planning is a logical step toward mistake-proofing a business. So, to suppress the reluctance to change or even participate in the project, it is important for the sponsor to be of sufficient stature as to overcome objections before they are raised.
Ideally, the sponsor is the company’s CEO, or the Vice President in charge of the local facility. However, sometimes it is a department manager who realizes that something must be done. Whoever assumes this role must remain involved with the project throughout its lifetime. As the sponsor’s interest fades, so will the interest of your team. Find out why they want to sponsor the project. It will tell you how much support to expect.
In some cases, the sponsor honestly believes the project is a good idea and is personally interested in seeing it is completed. In other cases, the sponsor may have been required to start this project due to an auditor’s citation of a poor business practice. In this situation, the sponsor may only want the minimum recovery plan to satisfy the audit citation. Spend some time early in the project digging out what is motivating support for this project. By understanding what motivates the sponsor, you can gauge how much time and money will be available to you. It is also possible for you to educate the sponsor on the many advantages of having a well-written company-wide plan.
The sponsor’s first task is the selection of the Business Continuity Manager, who will act as the project manager. In most companies, the cynics say that if you raised the issue, then the job is yours! This isn’t a bad way to assign projects because only the people who believe in something would raise the issues. Still, the selection of the right Business Continuity Manager will help make this project a success and the wrong one will make success much more difficult to attain.
The sponsor has the additional duties of approving the plan’s objectives, scope, and assumptions. The sponsor must also obtain approval for funding.
THE BUSINESS CONTINUITY MANAGER
The selection of the person to spearhead this project is the single most important part of building a plan. The Business Continuity Manager should be someone who can gain the willing cooperation of team members and their supervisors. To help ensure the support of everyone in the organization, the Business Continuity Manager should be publicly assigned to this task with the sponsor’s unqualified support. This is essential to overcome internal politics and to let everyone know that their assistance is important and required. As the project moves forward, regular public displays of support are required if the project is to result in a complete and usable plan. Form 1-1 (see companion url) is an example of a letter appointing the Business Continuity Manager.
Some sponsors begin a business continuity project by hiring an outside consultant to build the plan. This can be a good way to get the project started and to mentor someone in the organization to assume the Business Continuity Manager position. More effort and expertise is needed to organize and develop the plan than to administer it. As the plan is built, the consultant teaches the Business Continuity Manager the ropes.
Understand that even though the consultant is guiding the project, the consultant should not assume the role of Business Continuity Manager. Every company, every facility, every computer site is unique. The actions necessary to promptly restore service are the result of the key people at each site writing down what to do and how to do it. Outside consultants can provide considerable insight into the basic services (electrical, telephone, water, data processing), but lack in-depth experience at your company. They don’t know your business processes. They don’t understand the pulse of your business and what its key elements are.
Building a solid plan will take a lot of time. An experienced consultant working with an internal Business Continuity Manager can help move the project along quicker. The Business Continuity Manager is also the logical candidate to become the plan’s ongoing administrator once the initial project is completed. This person will be responsible for keeping the plan relevant and current. Writing a plan and then filing it away is a waste of money. Whoever builds the plan will be intimately familiar with it. That person can easily continue responsibility for maintaining it and teaching others how to keep their portion of the plan current. Using an outside consultant as a Business Continuity Manager raises the possibility that no one has internal ownership to ensure it is updated and tested periodically. The plan must be kept up to date if it is to be useful when it is needed most.
As the plan administrator, the Business Continuity Manager will ensure that as new equipment enters the building, as new products are rolled out, and as new business processes are implemented, they are reflected in the business continuity plan. The Business Continuity Manager also schedules and evaluates the ongoing testing of the plan by department, or by a specific threat, such as the loss of electrical power, to ensure it works. Once the plan is written, the Business Continuity Manager’s role will evolve into ensuring the plan is an integral part of the company’s ongoing operations. No new company process or piece of equipment should begin operation until the mitigation and recovery plans have been tested and approved.
SCOPE OF THE PROJECT
One of the first tasks the Business Continuity Manager must perform is to come to an agreement with the project sponsor as to the scope of the project. The scope of the project defines its boundaries. It identifies what is included in the project and what is not. If the project is too vast, it will probably fail. If it is too small, then it would be best assigned to a single person like any other office detail. The scope of the project must be given a lot of thought. If in doubt, start with a narrow focus on a specific department or function to demonstrate the plan’s value and build up from there. One guideline commonly used is any event that would cost (in lost wages, sales, etc.) more than 5 percent of your quarterly revenues merits its own plan. So, if a temporary outage of a critical machine stops the entire factory, then it needs a plan. If the same machine stoppage means that three extra workers must drill holes with hand tools until the machine is repaired, then it probably does not need a plan.
A good way to approach the plan is to address areas that everyone uses, such as security, data processing, electrical, and so on. Don’t try to tackle too much, too fast. Start with building services, then security and safety, then data processing. In this way, if the project is killed, you still have some useful documents.
If your recovery plans will encompass many sites or a large complex, then start with a pilot project for a single building, a business function, or even for your Data Processing department. This will build your team’s expertise and confidence, resulting in a very useful document, and demonstrate real value to top management. The scope of the project will drive the resource requirements for the project in terms of how many people it will involve, how long it will take, and the budget required to complete it.
The project scope must be a written statement. Here are three examples with gradually narrowing requirements. As you read these scope statements, imagine what sort of implied tasks these statements carry (or as they say, “The devil is in the details!”). Follow up on the scope statement by clarifying the timelines, criteria for success, and overall expectations for this project. Otherwise, you would be digging up information and writing forever.
EXAMPLE #1
If you were in a factory’s Data Processing department, your scope statement might be:
Develop, implement, and provide ongoing testing for a business continuity plan for the factory’s automated systems to include the computer rooms, the internal and external telephone system, the shop floor control systems, and data connections to both internal and external sites. This plan will provide specific action steps to be taken up to and including emergency replacement of the entire computer and telecommunications rooms.
Note that this statement does not include the factory machines (drill presses, mills, conveyors, etc.) or the front offices. It is focused on the telephone system and the internal data processing functions.
EXAMPLE #2
If you were the Director for Building Security, your scope might be:
Write an emergency contingency plan to address the possibility of fire, personal injury, toxic material spill, and structural collapse. Include escalation procedures, emergency telephone numbers, employee education, and specific emergency actions. Make recommendations concerning potential mitigation actions to take before a disaster strikes. Ensure the plan conforms to all legal, regulatory, and insurance requirements.
The project scope described in this statement does not include flood controls or security actions. Although some security tasks may be implied, very little is called for.
EXAMPLE #3
An even narrower approach might be:
Document all the payroll procedures and recovery processes to ensure that paychecks are always on time and that the automated vacation balance tracking system is available even during an electrical outage.
Note that this scope statement does not include time clocks, exception reporting, or interfaces with your accounting system.
Most people do not have any idea of what a disaster plan would look like. They imagine some large book just sitting on the shelf. In this situation, you could demonstrate the usefulness of the plan by building it a piece at a time. You might build the part that covers the core utilities for a facility (electricity, gas, telecommunications, water, and heating and air conditioning). As you review with the sponsor how these essential services will be recovered after a disaster, the sponsor will begin to see the usefulness of your work. If your company has multiple sites, it might work better for you to build the plan one site at a time.
TIMELINES, MAJOR MILESTONES, AND EXPECTATIONS
The output of a scope statement is to build a list of goals for the project. These are specific results against which the success of the project will be judged. Detail any expectations as to a completion date or major milestone dates. If this project is in response to an internal audit item, then the due date might be when the auditor is scheduled to return. If the Board of Directors required this to be done, then progress reports might be due at every directors meeting. Ensure all key dates are identified and explain why they were selected.
The term “expectations” can also be described as the criteria for success. Be clear in what you are asking for. A business continuity plan should only include critical processes. A critical process is usually defined as a process whose interruption would cause a material financial and operational impact over some time interval that you define (5 percent or greater of quarterly revenues is standard). You can’t plan for what to do down to the front door being stuck open. That level of detail would be too difficult to maintain. Focus on the critical business functions and the processes that support them. Your long-run goal is that the business continuity planning process will become an integral part of how business will be conducted in the future.
Some example criteria for success include:
Every department’s continuity plan must provide for employee and visitor safety by detailing to them any dangers associated with this device or type of technology.
Each department’s continuity plan must be understandable to anyone familiar with that type of equipment or technology.
A business continuity plan will be submitted for every critical piece of equipment or critical process in the facility.
At the end of the project, the Business Continuity Manager will submit a list of known weaknesses in the processes or equipment along with long-term recommendations to address them.
All continuity plans will be tested by someone other than the plan’s author and certified by the department manager as suitable for the purpose.
This project shall commence on June 1 and be completed by December 31. By that time, all plans must be complete, tested, and approved by the department managers.
In terms of a timeline, the length of your project will depend on how supportive the team members are of this effort, how complex your operations are, and how detailed your plan must be. Generally, these projects have an initiation phase and then the various departments break off and work in parallel to write their respective plans. During this phase, they also perform initial testing of the plan. At the end, all the plans are compared and modified to avoid duplicate mitigation actions and to ensure one person’s mitigation step doesn’t cause problems for someone else. The capstone event is the system-wide disaster test.
As a general guideline, most plans can be completed in about six months, depending on the project’s scope, the degree of management support, the number of locations to be included in the plan, and the amount of resources available. One month is spent on the start-up administration and training. About three months are needed to draft and test the departmental plans. Be sure to stay on top of these people so they don’t forget about their plans! The final synchronization and testing should take an additional two months. However, as your team members are probably assigned to this project part-time, their level of participation will vary based on their availability. The Business Continuity Manager must be flexible but, in the end, is responsible for driving the project to its completion.
ADEQUATE FUNDING
One of the indicators of the seriousness of a project is the presence of a separate budget item to support its activities. It is the Business Continuity Manager’s responsibility to track the funds spent on the project and to demonstrate the benefit they provided. If a separate budget is not available, then clear guidelines on a spending ceiling for the project must be set.
Among the items to include in the project budget are:
The Business Continuity Manager and key team members should attend formal business continuity planning training to obtain a thorough grounding in its principles. This speeds the project along and removes some of the guesswork of building a plan.
You may need to pay a consultant to advise the project and mentor the Business Continuity Manager as the plan is being developed.
Sometimes the folks with the most knowledge about your processes are not available during normal working hours. For these people, you may need to schedule meetings on weekends or off-site to gain their full attention. This may incur overtime expense or the cost of a consultant to backfill the person while they work on the plan.
Temporary help might be needed for administrative assistance, such as documenting the wiring of your data networks, transcribing notes for those without the time or inclination to type, or conducting an asset inventory.
It is a good practice to build team spirit for the project to carry you over the rough times. This might be shirts, hats, special dinners, performance bonuses, and many other things to build team cohesion. It is amazing what bringing a few pastries into a meeting can do for attendance. Visible recognition also helps to maintain the team’s enthusiasm.
VISIBLE ONGOING SUPPORT
If the goal of this project was to determine which employees deserved to have their pay doubled, you would be inundated with folks clamoring to join your team. Unfortunately, an assignment to a business continuity planning team may not be considered a high-profile assignment. This could discourage the enthusiastic support of the very people you need to make this project a success. To minimize this possibility, the visible, vocal, and ongoing support of the sponsor is very important.
Once the sponsor and the Business Continuity Manager have agreed on the scope, the sponsor should issue a formal memo appointing the Business Continuity Manager in a letter to the entire organization. This letter should inform all departments of the initiation of the project and who has been appointed to lead it. It should also describe the project’s scope, its budget or budget guidelines, and major milestones and timelines, as well as alert the other departments that they may be called on to join the project and build their own recovery plans. This memo will detail who, what, where, when, why, and how the project will unfold. The closing paragraph should include a call for their assistance in ensuring the project will be a success.
The sponsor should provide periodic updates to senior management on the progress of this project, which should include milestones met and problems that need to be overcome. Regular visibility to senior management can go a long way toward the continued support of each department with which you’ll be working.
SELECTING A TEAM
Once the sponsor and the coordinator have defined the scope of the project, the next step is to create a team. As you begin the project and start selecting your team, be ready for a chorus of resistance. Some departments will be indignant about being forced to join this project since they already have a plan (it’s just no one can find it). Even if they have a plan, it does not mean that it is a good plan, or it may have interdependences with other areas and needs to be linked to other plans. Some will already have a plan being developed, but under scrutiny you see it has been under development for the last 10 years.
So, with the naysayers in tow, prepare to select your team. In the case of existing, workable plans, ask that a liaison be appointed. For the plans under development, ask that those hardworking people join the project team. As for any parsimonious financial people trying to kill your project’s training request, ask the sponsor to override objections and allow the team to attend training on the latest business continuity best practices.
IDENTIFY THE STAKEHOLDERS
While forming your team, take time to identify the project’s stakeholders. A stakeholder is anyone who has a direct or indirect interest in the project. Most stakeholders just want to know what is going on with the project. Stakeholders need to be kept regularly informed about the project’s progress or problems with which they need to assist.
For all stakeholders, identify their goals and motivation for this project. Based on this list, you will determine what to communicate to them, how often, and by which medium. Some stakeholders’ interests are satisfied by a monthly recap report. Some will want to hear about every minor detail. Form 1-2 (see companion url) is a Stakeholder Assessment Map. Use it to keep track of what the key stakeholders are after in this project so you do not lose sight of their goals. The strategy is an acknowledgment that you may need to apply some sort of specific attention to an essential person to keep them supporting this important project.
FORM THE TEAM
The size and makeup of your team depends on how you will roll out the project. In the very beginning, it is best to start with a small team. Always respect people’s time. Don’t bring anyone into the project before they are needed. The initial team lays the groundwork for the project by arranging for instructors, coordinating training on building disaster plans, or helping to sharpen the focus of what each plan should contain.
The core team should consist of the sponsor, the Business Continuity Manager, an Assistant Business Continuity Manager, and an administrative assistant. This group will prepare standards, training, and processes to make the project flow smoother.
Several other key people will eventually need to join the team. You may want to bring them in early or as they are needed. This may include people such as:
Building Maintenance or Facilities Manager. They can describe what mitigation steps are already in place for the structure, fire suppression, electrical service, environmental controls, and other essential services.
Facility Safety and Security. They should already have parts of a disaster plan in terms of fire, safety, limited building and room access, theft prevention, and a host of other issues. If these plans are adequate, this may save you from writing this part of the plan. Be sure to verify that these plans are up to date and of an acceptable quality.
Labor Union Representative. In union shops, the support of the union makes everyone’s job easier. Show union leadership how a carefully created plan will help keep their members working and they will be very helpful.
Human Resources. The HR people have ready access to up-to-date information about the individuals who are important to the plan.
Line Management. These individuals tend to know the most about what is critical for getting the work done in their areas of responsibility.
Community Relations. A disaster may affect more than just your operations. You may need help from the surrounding community while recovering from a disaster.
Public Information Officer. This is your voice to the outside world. The role is critical in getting accurate information out to customers and vendors when dealing with a disaster.
Sales and Marketing. These people know your customers the best and can provide insight on what level of service is required before customers begin to fade away.
Finance and Purchasing. These people know your vendors the best and can provide insight on what kind of support you can expect from vendors while recovering from a disaster.
Legal. You need more than just common sense during an emergency. Your legal team can provide important insight on the legal ramifications of activities performed in response to an emergency.
The next step is to make a few tool standardization decisions. The company’s technical support staff usually makes these decisions for you. Announce to the group the standard word processing program, spreadsheet, and, most important, the project management software everyone will need on their workstations. Most people have the first two, but few will have the project management software already loaded. Be sure that as people join the team, copies of the software are loaded onto their workstations and training is made available on how to use this tool.
Provide example templates for the recovery documents. This step will ensure that the same type of information is found in all plans under the same headings. Also, it is easier to start writing if the basic document layout is already determined.
You will get the best results by investing some time training team members on how to write their portion of the plan and providing administrative help if they have a lot of paperwork to write up (such as network wiring plans). Every person reacts differently to a new situation, and being assigned to this team is no exception. If you will take the time to assemble a standard format for the plan and a process to follow to write it, then people will be a lot more comfortable being on the team.
A project of this type will generate a lot of paper. If possible, the accumulation of the various plans, wiring diagrams, manuals, and so on should be shifted from the Business Continuity Manager to an administrative assistant. An administrative assistant will also free the Business Continuity Manager from having to coordinate team meetings and track the project costs. Although these tasks are clerical in nature, they may also be given to the Assistant Business Continuity Manager. Another value of appointing an Assistant Business Continuity Manager is that it provides a contingency backup person in case something happens to the Business Continuity Manager, as this person will quickly learn about all aspects of the plan.
Once you are ready to roll out the project plan to the world, pull in representatives from the various departments involved. When tasking the department managers to assign someone, ensure they understand that they are still responsible for having a good plan so that they send the proper person to work on the team. This person need not know every aspect of their department, but they should understand its organization, its critical hardware and software tools, and its major workflows.
Depending on the project’s scope, you might end up with someone from every department in the company. This would result in too many people to motivate and keep focused at one time. Break the project down into manageable units. Start with an area you are most familiar with or that needs the most work. Involving too many people in the beginning will result in chaos. Plan on inviting in departments as you begin to review their area. An example is fire safety. Although it touches all departments, it is primarily a Safety/Security department function.
Given all this, just what skills make someone a good team member? An essential skill is knowledge of the department’s processes. This allows the team member to write from personal knowledge and experience instead of spending a lot of time researching every point in the plan. Members should also know where to find the details about their departments that they don’t personally know. Another useful skill is experience with previous disasters. Even the normal problems that arise in business are useful in pointing out problem areas or documenting what has fixed a problem in the past. And of course, if team members are to write a plan, they need good communications skills.
Department managers should appoint a representative to the business continuity planning project team by way of a formal announcement. However, the Business Continuity Manager must approve all team members. If someone with unsuitable qualifications is sent to represent a department, they should be sent back to that manager with a request to appoint someone who is more knowledgeable about that department’s processes. When rejecting someone from the team, be sure to inform your sponsor and the originating manager as to why that person is unsuitable.
The people on the initial project team are the logical ones to spread the good word of business continuity planning back to their departments. Time spent educating them on the continuity planning principles and benefits will pay off for the company in the long run. They can also learn more about the company by proofreading the plans submitted by the other departments. This has an additional benefit of broadening the company perspective of many of the employees. Use Form 1-3 (see companion url) to map out the responsibilities of each member of the team.
ROLLING OUT THE PROJECT TO THE TEAM
Team meetings are an opportunity to bring everyone together so they all hear the same thing at the same time. This is when you make announcements of general interest to everyone. It is also a good time to hear the problems that the team has been encountering and, if time permits, to solicit advice from the other team members on how to approach the issue. A properly managed meeting will keep the team members focused on the project and the project moving forward.
In the beginning, conduct a project rollout meeting with an overview of why this project is important and an explanation of what you are looking for. This is your most critical team-building meeting (you never get a second chance to make a good first impression). In most meetings, you will work to bring out from the people their thoughts and impressions on the project. But at the first meeting, be prepared to do most of the talking. Lay out the roles of each player and set their expectations about participation in the project. Information makes the situation less uncertain and the people can begin to relax. This is your first big chance to teach, cheerlead, and inspire your team! Sell your project to them!
The team members should leave the meeting with a clear idea that this project is of manageable size—not a never-ending spiral of work. Use this meeting and every meeting to informally teach them a bit about business continuity planning.
As the project progresses, you will be surprised how hard it is to get business continuity information out of people. Some people are worried that others will use it to dabble with their systems. Some folks just don’t know what they would do in a disaster and intend to ad lib when something happens, just like they always have. Have patience, ask leading questions, and get them to talk. When they have declared their plan complete (and you know it is only a partial plan), conduct a meeting with the team member, their manager, and the sponsor to review the plan. Step through it item by item. By the time that meeting is over, team members will realize that they will be accountable for the quality of their plans.
PLANNING THE PROJECT
Refer to the sample plans included in the companion url for ideas to include in your plan. Any plan that you use must be tailored to your site and management climate. Always keep your plan in a software tool like Microsoft Project. Such programs will recalculate the project’s estimated completion date as you note which tasks are complete. It can also be used to identify overallocated resources.
Okay, now it is time to build the project plan. This is best done with input from your team. There are four basic processes to building your plan: identifying the activities, estimating how long each task will take, deciding who should do what (or what skills this person should have), and then sequencing the tasks into a logical flow of work. The general term for this is a work breakdown schedule, which describes it quite nicely.
IDENTIFYING THE ACTIVITIES
What must be done? Your core project team members can be a great help here by identifying the steps they see as necessary to complete this project. Although some tasks will logically seem to follow others, the focus here is to identify what needs to be done. How deeply you “slice and dice” each task is up to you. Unless it is a critical activity, you should rarely list any task that requires less than eight hours of work (one day). The times in the sample plan are calendar time, not how long the task will take. This is because your team members may only work on this project part-time.
Write a brief paragraph describing each task. This will be very useful in estimating the time required to complete it. It also keeps the task’s scope from spiraling out of control. You may understand what you mean for a task, but remember, someone else will probably execute the task, so an explanation will be very useful.
Always document your planning assumptions. A planning assumption is something that you believe is likely to be true but you are not sure. Each assumption has a risk of being false. Assumptions enable planning to move forward. For example, one assumption is that specific people will be available at a specific date to perform a task in the plan. This is not a fact because there is a risk they will quit, become ill, etc. Still it is reasonable to assume it is true. As assumptions are proven to be true or false, they can be marked as “complete” on the list.
When discussing the plan with others later, this explanation of what you were thinking at the time the plan was drafted will be very useful. By listing your assumptions, you can discuss them point-by-point with the team and your sponsor to avoid areas that the plan should not address and to identify why a specific course of action was followed. The sponsor may also confirm assumptions as true.
Along with the assumptions, list all the known constraints for the project. This might be a specific due date to meet a business or legal obligation; it might be project funding issues or even a limit on the number of people available to be on the team. A major benefit of listing your project constraints is that upon examination they may be less than you think or can be used to prevent the scope of the project from expanding.
DETERMINING ACTIVITY DURATIONS
Once the tasks are laid out, estimate how much time should be set aside for each task to be completed. Creating reasonable time estimates for someone else is tough. You may think you know what needs to be done, but you could underestimate the true work required. Also, not everyone has your strengths—or weaknesses. Therefore, the estimates you assign at this stage are a starting point.
When a task is assigned to a team member, take the time to discuss with them what each task involves and see how long they think it will require. Be sure that they understand what each task entails so they can estimate accordingly. Update the plan with their estimated task durations and start dates. It is unfair to the team members to drop a task on them and demand a date without any further explanation.
Once you negotiate the duration of a task with someone, encourage them to stick with it. Other people further along in the project may be depending on this task to be completed before they can start.
WHO SHOULD DO IT?
Some tasks are easy to assign. If the task is to validate the key locker security, it will go to the Security Manager. If that person chooses to delegate it to someone else, then it is still his responsibility to ensure the task is properly completed on time. Some tasks will be more general in nature and need to be spread around the team fairly. If a task is not needed, don’t hesitate to delete it. If it is necessary, don’t hesitate to assign it!
This is a good time to identify any gaps in your available labor. If you see a large time commitment for the Data Network Manager and little likelihood that team members will be available to do the assigned work, you might generate a task to bring in some temporary help to assist them. Other time issues may be on the horizon. For example, if you need to involve the Accounting Controller, and the project will run over the calendar time for closing the fiscal year accounts, then you would schedule their project participation to avoid this time.
SEQUENCING THE ACTIVITIES
Now, put all the tasks in some sort of order. In this type of project, the beginning of the project is somewhat sequential. Later, many tasks will run in parallel when the various groups break off to write their respective plans. Select an estimated start date and then place some dates on your plan. With the plan held up against a calendar, check to see if any tasks need to be resequenced or if they conflict with some other critical company activity.
If your task contingencies are in place, the project management software will fill in the plan dates for you. If when you save the plan you select the option to save without a baseline, you can easily change the start date later.
Next, you should level your resources so that one person isn’t asked to complete more than eight hours of work in one day. This occurs when people are assigned too many tasks that are running simultaneously.
PLAN RISK ASSESSMENT
So now that you have a rough plan, with time estimates and sequenced in some sort of a logical flow, it is time to scrutinize the plan for problems. Are there any labor resources overextended? Look at each task area. What is the risk that an item won’t be completed on time? Yes, there is always a risk that a key person won’t be available. List any other underlying potential problems.
Most projects share the same basic risks to their success. In addition, each project has its own risks unique to what you are trying to accomplish and to your environment. Common project plan risks include:
The amount of experience the Business Continuity Manager has in leading this type of project. Less experience adds risk to the project timeline. Extensive experience lowers the risk.
The level of management support for the project. If you have low management support, you will have high project risk to the budget and timeline for team cooperation, and vice versa.
Adequate funding to complete the project with a top-quality result. Don’t let needed training, support activities, or mitigation actions be cut from the budget.
The number of locations involved in the project at one time. The more locations there are involved, the greater the project’s risk of failure. If possible, run a separate project for each site and do not attempt to do them all at the same time.
The number of departments involved with the project at one time. Like trying to work across too many sites, trying to handle too many departments will fragment the Business Continuity Manager’s time and increases the likelihood of failure. Consider tackling fewer departments at one time.
The frequency and length of business interruptions to the project. This could be an upcoming ISO audit, it could be a quarterly wall-to-wall inventory, it might even be the end of the fiscal year. The more interruptions to the project’s flow that you can foresee, the higher the risk of failure.
The knowledge and quality of the people assigned by the various departments. The time required to complete your business continuity plans will depend on the experience of the people involved. Typically, the Data Processing department has the most to write and will take the longest.
A mandated completion date, which may not be realistic.
EXECUTING AND CONTROLLING
Now you have a project sponsor, a budget, the project plan, and a core team assigned. It is time to get your project under way! A Business Continuity Manager must be the inspiring force behind the project. At those times when everyone is piling work on your team members’ desks, you must be the driving force in keeping this job as a priority project until it is finished.
As the project progresses, you will make decisions as to what is included in your project charter and what is not. This “scope verification” may mean that as the project progresses, you discover that it must involve specific actions that were not foreseen when the project was started. It may also involve the nice-to-have things that pop up as a project moves on. In either case, recognize these things as they occur and make a conscious decision to accept or reject them. Do not let anyone else add tasks to the plan without your approval or your tightly planned project will turn into an untamed monster!
COMMUNICATIONS PLAN
Every person within your organization has different information needs and preferred channels for receiving that information. The sponsor shouldn’t be burdened with minute details; the department managers should be responsible for tracking what their people are doing. To provide the right level of information to the right person at the appropriate time, you need to build a communications plan. The more people involved with your project, the greater your need for communication.
A communications plan details who needs to report about what and when. For example, who should receive project status reports? Who needs copies of the team meeting minutes? Who needs to know about minor project delays? To manage this, build a matrix that accounts for the information needs of all stakeholders. Your communications plan will address a wide range of audiences. Be sure to identify the person responsible for generating the communication and its major focus.
Evaluate every report and every meeting in your communications plan as to whether it will be worth the effort to prepare for it. Some reports may require more effort than they are worth. Some meetings are just a waste of time. Effective communication is important for focusing a team to a goal, but you must strike a balance between enough communication and the time wasted generating too much. Use Form 1-4 (see companion url) to plan who is responsible for what communications.
The communications plan will encompass more than memos floating around the office. It should include meetings with your team, meetings with your sponsor, and presentations to the various departments. Another important communications task is to raise the awareness of the employees of your project and how it impacts them. Posters, newsletter articles, and open meetings all serve to answer their questions and are useful for instilling a business continuity culture in your company.
The information that you need to communicate falls into three main categories:
1.Mandatory communications are things that must be done, such as status reports to the sponsor and meeting minutes to the team members. Skipping a mandatory communication may affect your project’s support or credibility.
2.Informational communications include reports to the interested and curious. Many people will see the plan under development and believe that it directly or indirectly will involve them. Your informational communications will pass on project accomplishments, testing schedules, and things that may not directly affect them but they would want to know about. Informational communications can help to shape expectations, so interested people can better understand what is next instead of being surprised or disappointed.
3.Informational communications are similar to marketing communications. Here you are out to build a positive image of your project to the rest of the company. Your marketing communications will help to educate the entire company on the business continuity planning principles (risk analysis, mitigation, documentation, etc.) and how they can relate to every employee’s work processes. One effective method is to give a presentation on business recovery planning to each of the various department staffs. The more they understand it, the greater your support is across the company.
Form 1-5 (see companion url) is a sample stakeholder reporting matrix. Modify it to reflect your project team and business requirements. In this matrix, you will identify which persons might only want to see monthly status reports with summary comments, such as the sponsor. Department managers might need a weekly status report with specific accomplishments. Short stories on accomplishments might be suitable for the facility’s employee newsletter. The stakeholder reporting matrix also indicates the best way to deliver these reports. Do some of your executives ignore their email? Do some require face-to-face reports? Indicate the method of delivery to which they would be most receptive.
REPORTING USING THE COMMUNICATIONS PLAN
As the project progresses, you should occasionally revisit the project’s risk assessment. Things change; people come and go on a project; and what was once a looming challenge may at closer glance appear to be nothing at all. In addition, business conditions are in constant flux and that must also be figured into the update of your risk analysis.
Controlling is the process used to identify variation from the plan in the areas of:
Change control
Scope control
Cost control
Quality control
Performance reporting
Risk response
Your best tool for focusing the team on its goals will be a weekly team meeting. There are many fine books dealing with the proper way to conduct a meeting, but a few basics follow:
First, always publish an agenda before the meeting. It acts as an anchor to keep people from drifting too far off the subject.
Second, keep the meeting pertinent. Focus on recent achievements over the past 2 weeks and upcoming events of the next 2 weeks.
Third, keep the meeting under an hour. People lose focus the longer a meeting drones on. Side conversations should be stopped and taken outside the meeting. If you are finished in a half-hour, cut it off! People will respect the meeting time limit as much as you do, so set a good example.
Have your meeting at the same place and time every week, even if not much is happening. Try to make it a habit for them.
When planning your team meetings, involve a bit of showmanship to keep people involved. If they sit there passively, ask specific people questions, but never to embarrass them if they are late. If the discussions seem tedious, jump into the conversation to keep them focused and interesting.
Use slack time in the agendas to fill in with short training topics and visits by the sponsor or department managers.
Publish a meeting recap as soon after the meeting as possible. Detailed meeting minutes may become too burdensome but a recap of the high points gives you a document to talk from at the beginning of the next meeting.
Always include a copy of the updated project plan.
TEST “COMPLETED” PLANS
The quickest way to snap people out of lethargy is to publicly test the first plans submitted. You don’t need to pull the plug on a computer to do this. An easy test is to verbally walk through it. If the plan’s authors know that it is really to be read and see how you test it, they will be more thorough.
Do the first desktop walk-through with the plan’s author. You will uncover glossed-over steps where they clearly knew what to do but where, based on the plan, you had no clue as to what was next. After updating that version, do the same walk-through with the author’s manager (who may very well be called on to execute this plan) and look for gaps.
Reward those contributors who complete their plans on time. This is where your sponsor comes in. Everyone likes to be appreciated, and some liberal rewards for the first few completed plans will go a long way toward motivating the rest of the team. You’d be surprised how fast this kind of word spreads throughout a company.
SET UP AND ENFORCE A TESTING SCHEDULE
As the departmental plans roll in, update the project plan’s testing schedule. Testing will uncover gaps and inconsistencies in the current draft. Usually, this is a multiple step process:
The team member and the manager initially check completed plans by using a desktop walk-through.
The next level is to walk through the plan with someone familiar with the area, but not involved with the plan development.
Run a departmental test.
Once enough plans are ready, it is time to schedule a simulated major disaster. This might be over a holiday period or whenever the systems are lightly used. Testing will teach people some of what to expect in a disaster. It will also make them more familiar with the procedures of other functions.
Always follow testing or a disaster event with an “after-action” meeting and report detailing the lessons learned and updates made to the plan. Be sure to praise its high points and to privately express what it is lacking. Depending on how well your group members know one another, you can use team members for a peer evaluation. People must feel free to speak at these meetings without fear of retaliation or their full value will not be realized.
After-action reviews are a very powerful learning tool. They require a moderator to keep them focused and moving through five key questions. An after-action discussion follows a simple format:
What happened?
What should have happened?
What went well?
What went poorly?
What will we do differently in the future?
Appoint someone to take notes on these lessons learned. Send a copy to each participant, and the Business Continuity Manager should maintain a file of these reports. Refer to this file when updating the plan.
CLOSING THE PROJECT
Once you have your plan written and the initial tests are completed, it is time to close the project. All good things come to an end, as when the plan is transformed from a project to an ongoing business process. The transition involves reporting the project results to management, closing out the project’s budget, identifying known exposures for future action, and thanking your team members for their efforts. Closing the project involves the following steps:
Turn all files over to the Plan Administrator. What was once your project may become someone else’s regular responsibility. If the Business Continuity Manager is not to be the Plan Administrator, accumulate all files pertaining to this project and hand them over to the Plan Administrator. It is now the administrator’s job to ensure the ongoing test plan is enforced and that plan updates are issued in a timely fashion.
Make a final update to the project plan. It may be useful if sister companies want to use it for building their own business continuity plans. You can also refer to it when estimating task duration for future projects.
Report results to management. To wrap up your project, draft a recap of the progression of the project to management. In this, point out any major successes that occurred during the project, such as low-cost solutions found to important problems, materials found stashed away in closets that could be put to good use, and so on. In the report, be sure to point out the benefit of the cross-functional training received by the project team as they worked with each other during plan development and testing.
You should provide a final account of the funds spent on the project, broken down as to what part of the project they supported. This will assist in estimating the funds required for similar projects in the future.
Identify known exposures. A business reality is that not every worthwhile activity can be funded. During your risk analysis and mitigation efforts, you very likely uncovered many critical single points of failure that called for redundant solutions, unmasked obsolete equipment that must be replaced, or identified other mitigation actions that would make your business processes more stable.
Roll up these exposures into a report to management. List each item separately along with a narrative explanation of why it is important. Detail the advantages and disadvantages of this course of action along with estimated (or known) costs. These narratives may not be reviewed again for many months, so the clearer your explanation of the business reasons behind funding this action, the better. When your capital budgeting cycle rolls around, use this list as input to the budget.
Thank the team. Hopefully, careful notes were kept during the project so that team members could be recognized for their contributions to the project. In particular, those team members who overcame major obstacles to complete their plan and thoroughly test them are due special recognition. Acknowledgment of a job well done should be made as soon as possible after the fact. At the end of the project, it is time to again acknowledge these well-done jobs to remind everyone, especially management, of the individual accomplishments during the project.
CONCLUSION
After reading this chapter, you should now have a good idea of the overall strategy for developing a useful business continuity plan. Your odds for a successful project increase dramatically when you have a well-thought-out plan. The major steps for getting your project off to a good start are as follows:
1.Make sure the scope of the project is clearly defined. You need adequate time, funding, and support to be successful.
2.Carefully select the right team members. They must have a good understanding of the important processes within their departments and be able to clearly communicate the importance of the project back to their coworkers.
3.Identify the activities required, their durations, and who should do the work.
4.Communicate not only within the team but with the entire organization that what you are doing is important for everyone’s survival.
5.Test, test, test. If a plan isn’t tested, you won’t know whether it will work until it’s too late.
2
BUILDING THE BUSINESS CASE
Measuring the Impact on the Business
If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.
