Last week I attended a User Group meeting run by a Sydney-based partner called Picnet. This was the second in a series of round table discussions about the state of BC, DR and the emerging idea of resilience.
There have been some interesting conversations, and last week the issue of appropriate response strategies – and the difference between continuity and recovery arose. Despite the name of the discipline (continuity of a business) I think we often confuse operations continuity and recovery strategies.
The graphic above is a tool I use to describe this aspect and the lifecycle for a recovery situation. I am sure there are a lot of BCM Practitioners out there who use a similar graphic – I certainly am not claiming to have invented the concept. Key point being that capability (or produciton, throughput) drops to zero following a disruption and stays there for a period of time.
This is a graphic to describe a strategy based on recovery, not continuity. Continuity here would mean staying at the 0% of capability that the organisation dropped to after the incident. You could describe this as the “all your eggs in one basket” approach to designing business operations. It can happen if you have operations critically dependant on a single, centralised site; a central data centre/systems with recovery not failover options – or when (in the interests of efficiency and cost saving) you have all your stock in a single warehouse.
The continuity of business plan here will be around keeping customers informed and probably reducing demand while you race around trying to build to some level of “survival mode” production. One of the most critical capabilities will be your detect, react and immediate response – to keep that 0% lead time to a minimum.
A continuity approach would imply that capability does not drop to 0%
Designing and building operations such that you can keep that ‘Safety Net’ level of operations contributes to the entity being more resilient. It also changes the dynamic around the initial react/respond process.
Having continuity strategies in place for survival levels of product/service delivery will also change the nature of your recovery – with less panic and frantic running around. Essentially you will have multiple operating sites which of itself makes the recovery a little easier.
Concentration risk – the risk created by putting all, or the most critical, of your eggs in the same basket. I have posed a couple of questions at the end to prompt you to think about some aspects of your concentration risk.
Neither strategy is right for all businesses – you need to choose what is an appropriate level of investment for your operation/business. This can be captured in a single Continuity Plan for each Business (outlining the overall strategies) – and Recovery/Restoration Plans (describing how to do it) for operational/supporting units.
Continuity strategies are not cheap, nor are they easy to implement. It is unlikely you will achieve these strategies without solid support from the top of your organisation. The continuity/recovery strategies need to reflect the real financial risk that a disruption poses to your operations.
This just re-enforces the point that being resilient is about culture and attitudes (which need to be modelled top down) – and about how you are organised and operate day-to-day, not just how you operate during/after a disruptive event.
What is your view? Do you have continuous operations in place, albeit at a minimal level?
Do you have your critical business processes and your critical IT systems all in the same building/location?
Do you have the people who need to execute the IT DR Plan co-located with your critical IT Infrastructure?
While I'm in no position to answer your questions, I just want to say thank you for the excellent graphs. What I found particularly interesting was the “recovery peak” before returning to normal. I haven't seen that one before. Besides, the “back to normal” stage also seems to be missing from the traditional disruption profiles: http://www.husdal.com/2008/06/26/sheffis-disrup… However, I do believe that your figure is a more correct representation.
Hello Jan, thanks for dropping by,
Rather bizarre but I had Sheffi's book on the desk in front of me as I read your post! I think it is generally understood that a disruptive event is going to cause a backlog – hence the peak to overcome to return to normal.
I also find that representation forces people to confront the sustainability of their recovery strategies – the longer you stay at 0% (or below survival level) the higher that peak can become.