Why business continuity plans just didn’t cut it when needed
Responsible and forward-thinking businesses all had a business continuity plan (BCP) prior to the current crisis. Its role was clear: to outline how the business would continue to operate during an unplanned disruption in service. The problem is that no one envisaged the scale of the current crisis when making their plans. And the result was that a lot of plans unfortunately proved to be ineffective when needed.
The Business Continuity Institute defined the BCP as “A holistic management process that identifies potential impacts that threaten an organisation and provides a framework for building resilience with the capability for an effective response that safeguards the interests of its key stakeholders, reputation, brand and value-creating activities.” That makes good sense. However it’s hard to know how to plan effectively if you don’t know of every eventuality to actually plan for (the ‘potential impacts’ referred to).
The majority of businesses diligently making BCPs explored how quickly and easily their business could get back to normal following one of a series of potential events such as a terrorist attack, fire, flood or other natural disaster, or other major interruption such as lack of power for example. For most, this was really a plan for a disaster, and the likelihood was that it would never happen. If it did, then it would mean coping for a limited period of time before going back to normal afterwards.
No one imagined a deadly pandemic that would impact the entire world. For months.
3 issues with pre-pandemic business continuity plans
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Location
The vast majority of BCPs were designed to deal with location specific issues. In a nutshell, if one business site was unable to function, then back-up at an alternative location came into play. This was complex of course and involved physical workspace as well as IT – but this kind of response simply wasn’t relevant for the current crisis.
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Timescale
Many BCPs were written on the basis that problems would last for a limited time period –hours or days - and then everything would then revert to normal. Again, planning for a major crisis that constrains the entire workforce for months probably wasn’t expected or anticipated.
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Constraints
A lot of businesses struggled to build flexibility into their ability to respond to problems. For many, this has meant that adapting to enforced and widescale remote working was not supported by the IT infrastructure and has proved particularly problematic. And clearly the idea of 2m social distancing was unlikely to have been considered as a way to keep working environments functioning.
Considerations for your post-pandemic business continuity plan
In hindsight, it is now possible to look back and rewrite the BCP to take account of what we all now know. Obviously this would help to create a roadmap for dealing with a second spike in the current pandemic, or a similar future health risk, as well as adding further levels of robust response to deal with other potential challenges.
Consideration should be given to the flexibility built into operations and processes – technology infrastructure is obviously a small part of this. Speed of response is also crucial, and this current crisis has given many the opportunity to test that. Lastly, businesses should put in place plans and actions that help deal with financial distress in the event of problems lasting for longer periods (as we are currently seeing).
Join us on Tuesday 16th June 2020 at 10am for a webinar discussing the challenges facing businesses in the aftermath of Covid-19, and the role of IT in underpinning a resilient business continuity plan.
