I have come to understand that being an active blogger involves as much (if not more) time, reading and reacting to other people’s posts as it does writing your own.
Stoneroad’s Blog is another source of interesting thinking in the BC/DR field. I was particularly interested in this article – “If done right, we should be making coffee …”
This is a clever post, and obviously there is a little tongue-in-cheek humour on display. The theme just stuck in my head and it seemed like the obvious issue to write about today.
I often ask BC practitioners what they are going to do in a crisis/BC incident? Do they plan to go and play golf, or do they just stay around to make the coffee? I do not ask this to determine if their training/awareness program is in good shape, but to determine their overall approach to the practice of BC. In some cases it provides an insight into the effectiveness of their overall BC Program.
Is the Executive or the Practitioner the problem?
It is also helpful to ask the same question about your expectations of the Executives in your organisation. When the future of the company is on the line, do you expect Senior Management to go and play golf – or are they going to take over and run the response. My guess is the later – and if your Plan does not take that into account you have a problem.
Simple solution, either get rid of your management – or your plan.
· Over the years I have discussed BC issues with and facilitated BC/Crisis exercises for a wide-range of “C” level people. It has been very rare to find one that did not take the subject seriously.
· I have found many that did not see their documented BC Plans as describing how they would respond to an outage.
· It was not that they were not interested in BC/DR, they simply did not see what was being pitched to them as relevant.
· The problem was that the BC Program was focussed on the wrong level, process and outcomes.
· Sad to say, but many of these BC Practitioners (and their plans) run the risk of becoming irrelevant to their organisation and how it would respond to an outage.
To lead requires somebody willing to follow
An effective Continuity Management Program will need to provide the appropriate guidance to all levels of the organisation. Detailed plans and procedures for operational recovery and high level advice and guidance at the Gold/Strategic layer.
It is all about the fundamental design of the BC Program – then the selling and positioning of that program to Executives.
What do I think they should be doing?
· Provide a “Watch Desk” to monitor escalating incidents – and raise the alarm when the incident is not being handled well
· Playing a key role in the “Planning and Intelligence” function of Incident (or Crisis) Management
· Providing “Process Consulting” to the Executive Leadership
o Executives make the decisions, they need advice/briefing on the state of readiness and what recovery strategies have been adopted
o The BC Professionals should understand the critical functions, their key dependencies and the recovery strategies
· The BC Professionals are really the only people who are paid to think about these issue every day of the year – we need them to be available and providing guidance when the need arises.
Certainly the recovery effort will run more smoothly if everybody is aware of their role and trained in how to do it, but a resilient organisation requires leadership that is able adapt to the unexpected and respond to the unplanned.
More on my views about resilience tomorrow. And after that I will elaborate on why I stopped talking about “practitioners” and started to use the term “professionals”.
So, how do you see this issue? What do you see as the proper role for a BC practitioner during an incident? Do you expect your Executive to sit back and watch?
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