Introducing the App Endurance™ by the Erwood Group.
We launched Endurance™ by the Erwood Group for a number of reasons not the least of which is to expand our services and communications with our current and potential clients, but to also provide a space for knowledge sharing among professionals. Beginners and experts alike, but with a focus on business owners, managers and executives around all business preparedness-related topics.
These topics will mainly be business continuity, crisis management, Information Technology (IT) Disaster Recovery and cybersecurity. Along with a mix of other areas and experts in their respective fields with an emphasis on business preparedness. These will also include webinars, contests and live-streaming events.
For instance, we’ll hold some events around the psychological and emotional impacts on crisis managers and emergency managers. How to shift your business focus and sales during crises and or downturns, to name just two.
Events like these will be held in the coming months as we work out the “bugs” within the application and after we launch the Android version of the application. Likely to happen in September.
As of right now, there are two ways to get the Endurance™ by Erwood Group app. You can go to the Apple Store and search Endurance™ by the Erwood Group (it currently doesn’t show up yet just searching for Endurance™). Or you can click the link here: Endurance™ by the Erwood Group.
You can also access the app on PC or Mac (or any device) by going to the following URL in any browser: https://endurance-3.passion.io/
There you can sign up and log in where you will automatically have access to all free content. The app itself is also free.
Some content will require paid subscriptions and or additional purchases/upgrades. Such as premium courses and our newsletters.
Everyone has access to the main Free Community to chat and learn and most in-app live streams will be free and occur in the main community.
The app will also serve as an additional backup communication for us and our clients to communicate any issues, notifications or declarations. As well as an additional tertiary method of documentation and plan sharing in an emergency with our clients.
Another reason for doing the app is it makes it easier for us at Erwood Group to share all of our newsletters and other content directly within the Endurance™ by Erwood Group app. By doing this we created an archive where all of the archives are available to subscribers right at your fingertips on your mobile device without having to access or bog down the main Erwood Group website.
Did you know that 60% of small businesses that suffer a cyberattack will shut down within six months? That’s a sobering statistic that underscores the importance of having a solid disaster recovery plan in place.
However, even with the best intentions, many organizations make common mistakes that can leave them vulnerable to downtime, data loss, and costly recovery efforts. Learn about the 10 Disaster Recovery Plan Mistakes to Avoid for Your Business.
In this article, we’ll explore some of the most common disaster recovery plan mistakes and provide tips to help you avoid them. Read on to learn how to keep your business safe from disaster!
1) Not Having a Disaster Recovery Plan in Place
One of the biggest mistakes a business can make is not having a disaster recovery plan in place. A disaster recovery plan is a set of procedures and protocols put in place to help a business recover from a disaster.
Without a disaster recovery plan, a business can suffer significant financial losses and may even go out of business. A disaster recovery plan can help a business recover from a disaster quicker, with less damage to the business. It can also help ensure that critical business functions are restored as quickly as possible.
Creating a disaster recovery plan doesn’t have to be complicated. You can find a disaster recovery plan template available online. This can be customized to fit the specific needs of your business.
Testing is a critical component of any crisis management plan. It helps identify weaknesses in the plan and ensures that it will work when it’s needed most.
Testing a disaster recovery plan doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. There are many different ways to test a plan, ranging from tabletop exercises to full-scale simulations. The key is to ensure that testing is done regularly and that the plan is updated based on the results of the testing.
By not testing the disaster recovery plan, a business is essentially taking a gamble that the plan will work when it’s needed most. This is a risk that no business should be willing to take. Especially, when the consequences of a failed recovery can be catastrophic.
3) Not Backing Up Data Regularly
Data is the lifeblood of any business, and losing it can be devastating. That’s why it’s essential to have a backupdisaster recovery plan in place to ensure that data can be recovered in the event of a disaster. One of the most significant mistakes a business can make is not backing up its data regularly.
Here are some reasons why it’s crucial to back up data regularly:
Regular backups protect against data loss due to disasters
Many businesses must maintain backup copies of their data for regulatory compliance purposes
Having a plan in place can help a business maintain business continuity during a disaster and reduce the impact of downtime
There are several ways to back up data. These include cloud disaster recovery solutions and on-premise backup solutions. It’s essential to choose a backup method that’s appropriate for your business’s needs, taking into account factors such as:
Data volume
Recovery time objectives
Budget
Backing up data regularly is a critical component of any disaster recovery plan. Without regular backups, a business is at risk of losing data. This can have severe consequences.
4) Not Having A Clear Communication Plan
In times of crisis, clear communication is key to minimizing the impact on your business. Without a well-defined communication plan, employees, customers, and stakeholders may become confused. This can lead to delays in recovery efforts.
Here are some common mistakes to avoid when creating a communication plan for your disaster recovery IT plan:
Lack of Clarity on Roles and Responsibilities
Ensure that everyone involved in the recovery effort understands their role and responsibilities. This includes identifying who will be responsible for communicating with:
Employees
Customers
Vendors
Any other stakeholders
Not Having a Designated Spokesperson
Designate a single person or team to serve as the spokesperson for the company during a crisis. This person should have the authority to make decisions and communicate with all parties involved.
Failing to Establish Clear Communication Channels
Define the methods of communication that will be used during a crisis. This could include email, text messages, phone calls, or other methods. Make sure that all employees are aware of the communication channels and know how to access them.
Neglecting to Test the Communication Plan
Test the communication plan to identify any potential issues or gaps. This will help ensure that everyone knows what to do in the event of a crisis.
5) Not Training Employees on the Disaster Recovery Plan
A disaster recovery plan is only as good as the people who implement it. Your employees are essential to your business’s continuity. It’s crucial that they are well-prepared to handle any disaster that might strike.
Here are some common mistakes to avoid when training employees on the disaster recovery plan:
Assuming That Everyone Knows Their Role
Even if your employees are familiar with the business continuity vs. disaster recovery concepts, they may not know exactly what they need to do during a crisis. It’s essential they have clear guidelines and know their role in executing the disaster recovery plan.
Not Providing Enough Training
Don’t assume that one training session is enough to cover everything. Consider offering ongoing training and refresher courses. This will ensure that employees are always up-to-date and informed.
Neglecting to Test Employee Readiness
Testing the disaster recovery plan is not just about testing the technical systems. It’s also about testing employee readiness. Conduct regular drills and simulations to ensure that your employees can execute the plan effectively.
6) Not Using an All-Hazard Approach to Planning
One common misconception about disaster recovery planning is that it’s only necessary to plan for specific types of disasters, such as cyberattacks or natural disasters. However, a more effective approach is to use an all-hazard style of planning.
This approach to disaster planning focuses on preparing for all types of disasters, regardless of their cause, rather than just specific ones. An all-hazard plan takes into consideration all potential hazards that could impact your business, including:
Loss or reduction of people (e.g. employees, consultants)
Loss of property (e.g. facilities, assets, key equipment)
Loss of processes
Loss of technology (e.g. applications, data, networks)
Loss of vendor/supplier
An All-Hazard style plan recognizes that disasters can take many forms and can happen at any time. It provides a comprehensive framework for responding to any crisis and ensures that your business is prepared for a wide range of scenarios.
While technology can help you recover quickly, it is not always a failsafe solution. Here are some reasons why:
Technology Can Fail
Systems can malfunction, software can become outdated, and networks can go down. If you rely solely on technology, you could find yourself without a plan if your systems fail.
Technology Cannot Replace Human Decision-Making
In the event of a disaster, it is essential to have a plan in place that outlines how decisions will be made. Relying solely on technology can leave you without the human input necessary to make the right decisions in a crisis.
Technology Cannot Provide Context
When a disaster occurs, it is important to have a clear understanding of the situation. Technology alone cannot provide the context necessary to make informed decisions about how to respond.
Your disaster recovery and business continuity plan should involve more than just technology. It should also include procedures, policies, and guidelines that outline how you will respond in the event of a disaster.
Your plan should also involve people from across your organization, including:
Management
Employees
Stakeholders
By involving people in the planning process, you can ensure that your plan takes into account the needs of everyone involved.
8) Not Updating the Disaster Recovery Plan Regularly
Simply creating a plan is not enough. It’s essential to regularly update the plan to ensure that it remains relevant and effective.
Here are some reasons why not updating the disaster recovery plan regularly can be a costly mistake:
Changes in Technology
As technology continues to evolve, it’s essential to update your plan to keep up with changes. For instance, if a business migrates to a new software or cloud-based solution, the disaster recovery plan needs to be updated to reflect this change.
Changes in Business Processes
Business processes are continually changing. Your business should be updating your disaster recovery plan accordingly. If your business introduces new products or services or changes its operations, the disaster recovery plan needs to be updated to reflect these changes.
Changes in Personnel
If key personnel responsible for implementing the disaster recovery plan leave the company, the plan may become outdated. It’s essential to review and update the plan regularly. This ensures that new personnel get trained and can implement the plan effectively.
Changes in the External Environment
The external environment can be unpredictable. Businesses must consider external factors that may affect their operations. This can include natural disasters, cyber threats, or supplier issues.
Updating the disaster recovery plan regularly can help businesses prepare for these events and mitigate their impact.
9) Not Involving All Stakeholders in the Planning Process
Disaster recovery planning for IT is not just the responsibility of the IT department. The plan should involve all stakeholders in the organization. This ensures that all potential risks and impacts are taken into account.
Failure to involve all stakeholders can lead to inadequate planning and preparation. This could result in further complications in the event of a disaster.
IT staff members are responsible for managing the plan and implementing necessary procedures. Business owners and managers should be involved in the planning process as well. This ensures that the plan aligns with the overall business objectives and priorities.
You should train all employees on the disaster recovery plan. This can include their respective roles and responsibilities during a disaster.
Vendors and suppliers should be involved in the disaster recovery planning process to ensure that their services and products are available and functioning during a disaster. Depending on the organization, customers and clients may also need to be involved to ensure that their needs are taken into account.
10) Not Having a Cybersecurity Plan in Place
While disaster recovery planning is essential for a business to continue operating during a crisis, having a cybersecurity plan in place is equally important. Cyber attacks can cause significant damage to a business’s reputation, financial health, and operations. Without a cybersecurity plan, a business is vulnerable to data breaches, ransomware attacks, and other cyber threats.
Here are some common mistakes businesses make when it comes to cybersecurity planning:
Not understanding their cybersecurity risks
Not implementing security controls such as firewalls, antivirus software, and multi-factor authentication
Not training employees on cybersecurity best practices
Not having an incident response plan
Not regularly testing and updating their cybersecurity plan
Having a robust cybersecurity plan in place, in addition to DR solutions, can help a business better protect itself against cyber threats and minimize the impact of any cybersecurity incidents.
Don’t Make These Costly Disaster Recovery Plan Mistakes
Creating a disaster recovery plan is an essential part of any business’s operations. A well-executed disaster recovery plan can mean the difference between a minor disruption and a full-blown business catastrophe.
Everything You Need to Know About Business Continuity Plans
Business Continuity Plans
Chances are if you’re visiting this page, you are new to the concept of Business Continuity Plans (BCPs) and business continuity overall. You may have just been asked if you have business continuity plans by a current or potential customer. Maybe you were asked by your manager or a business owner to create a business continuity plan for the business or department. If this is the case, you’re in the right place to learn everything you need to know about business continuity plans.
If you’re a seasoned professional, stick around and read through the page and I hope you can learn something new. Or, if you feel like something is missing feel free to add your input in the comments below. I’ll also add to this article over time as things change or develop as needed, or as I learn or try something new.
Let’s get started with perhaps the most basic question, what is a business continuity plan?
Definition of Business Continuity Plan
A business continuity plan is best described as the plan you would use if your business were impacted by a disaster or disruption so that you could continue providing goods and services to your customers and clients. I also like to just call it disaster planning for business. I prefer this because I like to keep things as simple as I can. Also, I have a feeling the above definition is most likely the one you will remember best.
For a more complex version of what is a business continuity plan, let’s look at the official definition from the Disaster Recovery Institute International (DRII) Glossary: A documented collection of procedures and information that is developed, compiled, and maintained in readiness for use in an incident to enable an organization to continue to deliver its critical products and services at an acceptable predefined level. NOTE: DRII takes this definition from the Business Continuity Institute BCI and Disaster Recovery Journal DRJ.
Another definition from the Federal Continuity Directive 1 is, Continuity Plan is a documented plan that details how an individual organization will ensure it can continue to perform its essential functions during a wide range of events that can impact normal operations.
While business continuity has been in practice since the 1970s and could be argued that it has been around since the 1950s through strategic planning it is something that is not common knowledge. We’ll get into the history of business continuity in another upcoming article. For now, we’ll just focus on where we are at today.
Today what we are seeing is what I like to call “trickle-down continuity.” What I mean by this is that most large enterprises have business continuity plans in place and they are frequently requiring their vendors and suppliers to have similar plans in place. More specifically, they are requiring suppliers to have plans in place to support the continuing production of the goods and services they supply to them.
For smaller and mid-sized businesses, the first time they even hear the phrase business continuity is often through a request from a current or potential client asking if they have a business continuity plan in place.
The business continuity plans are commonly developed around the core business functions and processes that are needed to support the key products and services provided to customers. For small businesses, it is common to have just one all-encompassing plan. For businesses that have multiple departments, multiple products, multiple services, and many moving parts to the business, it is best to have multiple plans for each of these functions.
What Goes into Business Continuity Plans?
As I just mentioned you’ll want to focus the business continuity plans around key business functions and processes. We’ll take a deeper dive into those business functions later, but let’s first focus on what goes into creating effective business continuity plans.
Typically, each business continuity plan contains certain key elements that are considered critical to the business operations. Some businesses include additional information specific to their business or operational area they deem important or even critical to the recovery of the department or function the plan is created around.
One important thing to know is that the Business Continuity Plan should contain all the information required to implement the processes and strategies to perform the business functions contained in the plan. They should also have steps listed supporting the strategies in such a manner that someone of the same skill set should be able to follow them, take the appropriate actions, and complete them.
For the purposes of this article, I will discuss the typical elements that go into creating a business continuity plan and lay them out as they would actually appear within your business continuity plan. If needed, feel free to copy the format and use this as your business continuity plan template.
Appendices with Supporting Documents, Tracking Logs, and Recovery Forms
The above is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but it is a great place to start with your business continuity plans. To some, the above list is also a bit of what they would call overkill as many of these items mentioned can be placed into crisis management documents.
While it is true that this is a lot of information to include within your business continuity plans, we are also working on the assumption that you do not have any planning done previously.
Let’s look at each area individually.
Cover Page
The business continuity plan cover page contains some key information. This includes the name of the plan, who the plan owner is, the date the document was last updated, and the version number.
All of this information allows you to quickly determine if this is the appropriate plan for the needed business functional area recovery and that it is the correct and most up-to-date version of the business continuity plan.
Naming conventions usually follow a specific format that aligns with the needs and requirements of the business. Such as the following examples:
This may seem silly but including a Table of Contents within your business continuity plans is important to finding needed key information quickly in a crisis. Placing colored tabbed pages enables this even further.
Often these documents can grow quite large. Creating clearly defined sections and colorizing those makes it even easier to quickly find the information needed at the moment a disruption occurs. It also allows the main document to be broken up into sections so that the smaller documents can be distributed to teams to run each section. These sections can be created logically such as Operations, Finance, or broken into business recovery areas.
Business Continuity Plan Governance
For businesses that implement an entire business continuity management program, they will usually start by creating a charter that provides the details, framework, and lifecycle around the creation and processes around how the program will be run and how the plans will be created, maintained, and exercised.
For those smaller and mid-sized businesses that do not have a formal business continuity program in place, you’ll either want to create a governance plan or at the very least mention how the plans will be governed and created. Long-term, this should be done as a separate document.
Business Continuity Statement
Each plan should have a brief but informative Business Continuity Statement. These Statements are usually just one or two paragraphs but are never longer than a single page detailing the importance of business continuity to the business or organization. The mention of any alignment to the business mission statement and reasons for having a business continuity plan and program.
Usually, the business continuity statements will also make mention of any customer, regulatory, or other requirements the business is subjected to.
Additionally, it is also common to develop other customer-facing business continuity statements about the state of business continuity within the business and the importance of these plans and programs. Sometimes it will also include a section of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and their answers with information about what to do for inquiring about these programs further. Business continuity statements such as these are often placed on the business website or in a package given to potential and current customers when they ask about your business continuity plans.
Business Continuity Plan Introduction
The business continuity plan introduction is usually focused on the individual plan itself. It provides the overall high-level information as to the purpose, functions, and processes of what the business continuity plan is for. It may include the number of strategies or key functions the strategies are focused on.
Purpose
The introduction should also include a brief statement on the purpose of the business continuity plan as it pertains to the business and the key department and functions as part of the plan. This should also outline the specific activities of the plan including:
Detailing the departments and/or functional areas the plan covers and calling out the specific supporting processes that role up into the function
The key purpose – is the capability to restore these departments, functions, and processes to an acceptable level to support the goods and services provided to clients
Ensure a consistent and timely response to business disruptions
How the business and teams will work to recover these key elements in strategies and steps
Scope
The scope of the business continuity plan usually defines the key areas covered as part of the plan. This also sets the framework that can be applied across a variety of situations, events, disruptions, or disasters as the crisis dictates such as the loss of workspace, workforce, loss of a critical provider, vendor, or loss of technology.
Though some businesses develop plans based on a specific scenario or utilize scenario-based planning contingencies, it is best to set a scope a step above these scenarios. This is also a method similar to that in emergency management as All-Hazard planning.
For instance, rather than planning for a fire impacting the business, it is better to plan for the potential loss of the use of your facility. In the end, planning for and coming up with strategies for the loss of your facility, allows you to have these contingencies in place for a variety of situations that could render your facility unusable for any length of time.
The following are key things to include as part of your scope:
Loss of Workplace:
Loss of a workplace addresses the temporary or permanent unavailability of a primary work facility. Include the primary location of the facility in a manner such as shown
[City, State] – [Insert Building Address]
Reduction in Workforce:
A reduction in workforce accounts for the temporary unavailability of the primary staff that supports the delivery of a given business process
Loss of vendor:
Loss of vendor services addresses the loss of core critical vendors and suppliers that support business operations
Loss of Technology:
Loss of technology addresses the loss of one or more core critical technologies including, applications, data, data center, and network, hosted and delivered by the Technology Department.
Assumptions
As part of your business continuity plans, you will come up with a core set of assumptions that will be part of your overall planning. These assumptions include parameters around the available services, components of business response, and capabilities, that are required for the business continuity plans to function as designed.
Should these assumptions not be aligned at the time of an event, disruption, or disaster additional modifications to the recovery strategies as outlined within the plan will need to be enhanced, changed, or improved upon.
Public transportation & infrastructure is available, and not disrupted
Personnel & team members can travel, as required
At a minimum, one identified method of communication is always available including email/instant message, land-line telephones, and cellular telephones
Some, experienced & trained personnel familiar with the department’s activities and the Response Procedures are available
Civil society infrastructure (e.g., Government, School Systems, Public transportation, Public Communications Networks, Utilities, etc.) may become stressed (short-term delays/disruptions) but will always remain reasonably functional
Plans are reviewed and updated upon material change or annually at a minimum
Disruption Specific Assumptions
Loss of Workplace:
Only one primary site or location is impacted or disrupted at any time
The length of the Workplace disruption may exceed 30 days in duration
Alternate sites & locations are not impacted and are available for recovery use
Any information/records/inventory/etc. not stored offsite will be inaccessible or destroyed
Specialized/unique equipment at the Workplace may be destroyed/damaged/unavailable
Remote access capabilities (VPN) can accommodate large-scale remote access of displaced employees either in a remote or relocated fashion
Ample physical workspace is available and geographically distributed footprint to accommodate critical/essential employees requiring physical workspace for an unspecified period
Reduction in Workforce:
Up to 50% of normal staff may be unavailable for 4-6 weeks
Other local and remote locations may suffer staff shortages concurrently
Key personnel may be unavailable/impacted (single-points-of-failure)
Standard Operating or Desktop procedures for the daily performance of business operations are documented, available, and managed by the owning business process department
Loss of Vendor:
Only one critical provider (e.g., vendor/provider/supplier/dependency) is unavailable at any given time
Providers will be able to re-establish services within their contractually stated SLAs as agreed upon and implemented between the business and its third-party vendors and suppliers
Loss of Technology:
Application restoration (Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives) and the overall Information Technology recovery timeline are estimated and actual RTO/RPO values are estimated
Estimated workaround procedures, capabilities, and timeframes may change significantly due to a multi-application disruption scenario.
Business Functions
One of the key things to include as part of the scope is which key business functions to include as part of the business continuity plan. These should be core critical functions that are directly tied to providing core goods and services to customers that produce revenue or are tied and interdependent to revenue-producing activities.
You’ll also want to account for service level agreements (SLAs), regulatory requirements, reputational impacts on the business, and perhaps more.
Plan Activation
You will want to place language within the plan that describes who, when, and what specific events and situations will cause the Business Continuity Plans to be invoked if you know them. Alternatively, especially among immature business continuity programs, crisis teams are activated and plans are invoked only after assessments confirm the need to start business continuity processes.
In other businesses that have more mature business continuity programs, you will often find pre-defined protocols for when to implement the business continuity plans. Some managers have authority and experience as to when to invoke all or parts of a business continuity plan. These are usually implemented over time based on previous experiences that led to situations where partial or full plans had to be invoked. An example of this would be the impact on a business supply chain or supplier and some of these processes need to be shifted quickly.
Roles
You will need to include roles and responsibilities within your plans. Such roles should include Business Continuity Plan Owner and one alternate as well as team members responsible for implementing the BCP Procedures and strategies listed within the business continuity plans.
Responsibilities
Additionally, include clear responsibilities for each member of the Business Continuity Plans. Business Continuity Plan Owners are generally responsible for coordinating the team members and managing the invocation of the BCP. Though, they may also have to be the primary person implementing the plan if needed.
The team members are usually involved with performing the procedures in implementing the BCP as required. Any alternates are responsible for filling the roles where the primary person is unavailable.
Business Continuity Planning Committee
This is another element that is often covered in a business continuity charter document. However, again, small and mid-sized businesses may opt to include this information within their plans to address the lack of a formal charter. It simply outlines the purpose of the committee and the people on the committee. If the business is small enough, the committee may be the people involved in the plans themselves.
As you select your committee make certain you choose someone to chair the committee and a Candance of how often the committee will meet.
Plan Revision Tracking and Approval
A key element of any business continuity plan is to include plan revision tracking as well as the approval status and the current version of the plan is in.
This provides document control and ensures that when the plan is needed for use, those participants are utilizing the correct version of the plan. It also provides evidence of improvement over the course of time.
A Typical plan revision tracking looks something like the following:
Business Continuity Plan Revision Tracking
Some plans will have a separate section for approvals like the below:
Business Continuity Plan Approval Tracking
Additionally, the cover page of the plan will often have the version number as well. Long-term tracking is usually done in the appendix area of the document.
Key Contact Information
Every business continuity plan should contain key contact information for various areas. The most important contact information that should be in the business continuity plan is for the plan participants. These should be plan owners, functional area and process owners, and key people that will implement the business continuity plans upon invocation.
Be sure to include not just work email and phone numbers for these people but be certain to also include personal email and phone numbers so that these team members can be contacted during an emergency that may occur outside business hours.
Other key contact information should include the following:
Internal Contacts
Other additional internal key contacts should be included that are pertinent to the viability of the plan. Such as Incident Response Team members and their contact information. Other internal contact information may include other teams as well.
External contacts
You’ll want to include important external contact information. Some of this information can be broken into separate sections such as critical customers, critical vendors, and service providers, or placed on a single page if it fits.
You’ll certainly want to include contact information for the following:
Facility Management Provider/Building Owner
Utility Providers
Key Contractors – Electrical, Plumbing, cleaning, Locksmith, etc.
Internet and Telcom Providers
Legal
Insurance
Local Emergency Numbers beyond 911
Local hospital numbers
Local Emergency Management Office Numbers – EOC
Restoration Cleanup providers
Document Recovery and Salvage providers
The above is not meant to be an exhaustive list but a starting point. You’ll want to add external contacts based on your own business needs and concerns.
Risk Assessment
A Risk Assessment (RA) is often one of the first things you’ll do after the initial business continuity program creation. You’ll want to include key findings from any risk assessments that were performed. You do not need to include everything or go into deep detail about the risks the business faces. Keep it a high-level overview, and perhaps a direct list of the top 3 -5 risks but I would not go beyond the top ten risks the business is facing.
Business Impact Assessment
The business impact Assessment or more commonly referred to as the Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is the method for assessing the impact various events will have on the business. You will also want to document that the business has conducted a business impact analysis (BIA) within the business continuity plan. Again, there is no need to document this in fine detail. Just the high-level key findings discussing the greatest potential impacts to the business, the potential monetary and operational impacts, and how you might respond in a high-level way.
Critical Recovery Timelines
Sample Business Continuity Recovery Timeline
You will want to lay out any critical recovery timelines that are key to the portion of the business continuity plan. You’ll want to include your Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) for each process and the Maximum Allowable Downtime (MAD) for the function.
The below image is a sample Recovery Timeline Chart. It lays out each stage of the recovery process and is put into a timeline format so that a business can gauge where they are at in the process and how long it may be estimated to last.
The timeline is not a set-in-stone timeline, but an approximation based on things that usually happen during the recovery phases.
Crisis Management Levels
In many cases, a business continuity plan will also set different crisis management classification levels. Though again, more often placed within Crisis Management documents, some plans include a variation on specific levels of a crisis.
For example, a level one or L-1 could be a crisis or incident in which a facility has sustained damage, but it is minimal and contained within a specific area. The building can be entered but might be closed for up to 5 days or one business week for repairs. On the other hand, a level four or L-4 can mean major damage to the facility. The building is incapable of being occupied and repairs could take a month or longer. Delays in getting permission to enter the building to conduct repairs started are possible.
Ultimately how and what you decide to call out different levels of crisis or sustained damage will be up to you. Creating a defined set of criteria for this beforehand makes it easy to determine what level you will likely be at and works in conjunction with your recovery timeline to gauge how long your business could be disrupted. It also saves you significant time during the crisis trying to figure out how long the disruption and recovery might take.
Crisis Communications
Another key component to include within your business continuity plan is a crisis communications plan. This should primarily be centered around how and when to contact the key specific team members needed to enact the business continuity plan elements during an invocation.
As mentioned previously, key contact information should be included within the business continuity plan so that you don’t have to go hunting for that contact information when it is needed most.
The crisis communication part of the business continuity plan should include who to contact or how initial communications during an incident or crisis should be made. This includes notification and activation of any crisis management team, the business continuity team members, management, and or key specific employees.
Notifications
Notification of staff, management, and crisis teams is essential during an event or crisis. The quick this is done, the better the response and outcome you’ll likely have.
It is best to set up predefined steps and systems to provide these notifications ahead of time. It can be done through a third-party notification system, through email, by phone, or any other method or combination of methods you choose.
One common method still used today is using a call tree to have designated people call specific recipients. If you have a recovery team, crisis management team, or incident management team (or other terms of your choosing) they should be one of the first groups to get notified.
Call Tree
Business Continuity Call Tree
A major element of this should also include a Call Tree element of who is supposed to contact whom. The call tree is usually utilized in making initial notifications of an event. It doesn’t need to be complex but should be clearly defined. An example call tree is shown below.
Communication Templates
As part of your Crisis Communications, you will want to develop crisis communication templates to utilize during an incident, crisis, or disaster. You should have two sets of templates created. One for internal communications and another set for external communications.
It’s best to create some predefined templates with a fill-in-the-blank format so that they can be created quickly, and efficiently so that people aren’t scrambling for what to say during a crisis.
Internal Communications
For internal communications, you’ll want to have key specific messages sent or provided to employees. Some key quick messages that should be ready are:
Notifications to staff on staying home, working remotely, or reporting to an alternate location
Notifications to stand-by, and/or wait for further instructions
Notifications to call specific phone numbers, at specific times for additional information and instructions
External Communications
As for internal communications you’ll want to have clearly defined external communications ready for several different recipients. For example, you’ll want to communicate one message to your customers if needed as to what happened, how long you expect to be disrupted if you have disruptions, what you are doing specifically to continue to provide goods and services, and how long you expect to be operating at this level if known and any contact information where they can call in for additional information, or better yet when the next update can be expected.
You’ll also want to develop messaging for your vendors and a third set of communications to provide to the media and for public consumption.
Picking a Spokesperson
You’ll also want to pick a spokesperson or Public Information Officer (PIO) especially if you need someone to talk directly to the media. While most businesses make their own choices as to whom the spokesperson will be, we recommend that the person chosen should have some type of media training.
Status Reporting and Updates
As part of your crisis communications, you should have a system set up for receiving incoming status updates as well as reporting out status and situation reporting. Typically, this is done hourly, but your crisis response team should set the tone and pace for outgoing updates.
In setting the tone and pace be certain to end each update with a specific time as to when the next status report update will occur.
For more on managing a crisis please see our article on Crisis Management Response and Teams that we will be posting soon.
Recovery Strategies & Steps
The development, creation, and inclusion of recovery strategies and their supporting steps is a key fundamental element of your business continuity plans.
Without them both your business continuity plans will be lacking the necessary steps to implement the required processes to provide minimally acceptable functions to provide a continuation of goods ad services to customers.
In fact, one of the reasons why business continuity plans fail is the lack of viable strategies backed by actionable steps.
As we mentioned earlier, it is best to create strategies around certain key specific areas, rather than specific scenarios. The more strategies for each area that you have the greater the likelihood that you will be successful in your ability to execute and continue your business operations.
Here are those key Areas:
People
When creating strategies for your personnel you should start by thinking in terms of sudden and severe staffing shortages. Some questions to consider are:
What is the minimum number of people required to run or implement a function or process?
Do we have cross-trained people that can backfill or shift to cover that function or process?
Does moving personnel to cover a function or process leave another function short or incapable of being completed?
Can personnel on shifts work longer or different shifts without impacting output or capacity?
Can this function or process be completed easily by temporary workers?
Do we need to hire new workers?
How long will it take to train new or temporary hires?
Of course, the above doesn’t account for every situation. I have clients that operate globally, and they have plans to send key staff to other geographic locations in situations where personnel need training. Strategies such as this require additional elements and planning steps. For instance, could a person easily enter the destination country? How long can they stay? What other logistical considerations are required? All these things should be thought out beforehand.
Each strategy selected should be put into place in the order of preference or order they should be completed. If there is no specific order of preference for the strategies, they can still be numbered to track the various options you have available to you. Here is an example:
Strategy 1 – Utilize Existing Staff to Backfill
Strategy 2 – Hire Temporary Staff
Strategy 3 – Hire New Workforce
Steps
Each strategy should have clearly defined ordered steps that should be taken once a strategy is to be implemented. Let’s look at the above Strategies and Call out steps to complete each.
Sample Business Continuity People Recovery Strategies
Again, the above is not meant to be all encompassing but to provide you an idea as to what is required to support each step. The more specific you can make it the better it will be. For instance, instead of saying call temp agency to increase staffing levels, call them out by name, like this – Call XYZ Staffing Agency at (123) 456-7890. If you have a key contact or account manager there, you can even include, ask for Betty or Steve. The more specific you make it for your business, the better, smoother, quicker, and more efficient your recovery operations will go.
Property
Most businesses will just be concerned about facilities in this section. While that is the key focus here, I also utilize this section for critical and key assets and equipment as well. In this case we break them into their respective sections and have one for each – Facilities, Equipment, and Assets.
In one case, a client we had many years ago was an original equipment manufacturer in the high-tech industry. One of their key pieces of equipment was a million-dollar scanner and had a long lead time. The business had only one of these at the time we were developing their business continuity plans.
The main strategy was to relocate the equipment from the main facility to an alternate facility across the globe by moving it and flying it to an overseas facility until they could acquire an additional one.
Just like in the section for People, Property should lay out each strategy and the supporting steps. Let’s look at some examples for the loss of your facility:
Strategy 2 – Utilize Alternate Method – Notify Bank to Utilize Previous Weeks Payroll
Strategy 3 – Utilize Alternate Method – Use Phone to Take Customer Orders
Sample Business Continuity Process Recovery Strategy
Again, the above is meant to be an example, but taken from real responses. You’ll have to work out what is best for your own situation and business. Also make certain that the supporting steps are able to be carried out by your team.
Technology
The technology section usually covers core critical applications that play a functional role in providing or supporting critical processes. For instance, Salesforce, SAP, NetSuite, and other such applications.
Sample Business Continuity Technology Recovery Strategy
Vendor
It is best to utilize multiple vendors whenever possible. It is just as important to source secondary and tertiary vendors prior to an incident occurring. Yet, many businesses continue to utilize source at time of incident, I highly recommend you do not wait for an incident to occur.
Whether your vendor supplies a product or a service, you do not want to rely on one vendor and have them be impacted by an incident and stop suddenly serving you.
There are vendors that are the only ones that provide key products or services. Some of these single source vendors have a long lead time as well for obtaining new product. If this is the case, try to anticipate future needs and acquire or purchase the equipment or product before you need it. In many cases barring a disaster you should be able to accurately forecast for your future needs.
Equipment and Asset Location
Any team that requires critical equipment or assets to complete a function or process should know the specifics about these key items including, where they are stored, and what vendors they are associated with.
For instance, facilities should be able to locate and shut off, power to the building, main water shut-off valve, main gas shut-off valve, HVAC power cutoff, Sprinkler system shut off valve, etc.
You may have a key locker, decontamination equipment, laboratory equipment, laser cutters, CNC machines, key records, and documents, etc.
The location, key numbers, serial numbers, vendor, replacement cost, etc. should all be documented.
Annual Exercising & Testing
I generally do not like to use the term testing as some feel it has negative connotations. However, it is also a widely used and accepted term as is exercising. The main reason I avoid the term testing is that it causes some people unneeded and unnecessary anxiety. There is no need to make people feel like they are being placed under a microscope and examined.
With all of that said, annual exercising of business continuity plans should be the minimum number of times the plan is exercised or put into practice. Some, businesses will exercise some plans twice per year. Others struggle to meet the minimum requirements, and those businesses tend to run into trouble for several reasons.
First, if the plan is not being exercised yearly at a minimum, it is not likely being maintained or updated either. As the yearly exercise usually provides insight into needed changes to the business continuity plans.
Second, the more time that goes by without exercising, the less practice teams have in implementing the plan, and the more outdated it becomes.
When it comes to exercises, I developed an easy to implement and follow methodology called Learn, Practice, Implement, Challenge™.
This methodology has generated a lot of success among our clients and provides a clear definitive process of progressing through the maturity levels of both a business continuity exercise program, but to the overall business continuity program as well.
One additional thing we provide to our clients is an exercise scenario booklet that they can utilize to conduct quick exercises and discussion around impacts, recovery strategies, and more. These are designed for teams to add a 3–5-minute discussion around their planning during scheduled team meetings.
This also provides these teams with an edge and the ability to exercise on a small scale more frequently without being disruptive to normal business operations or requiring many resources.
For overall exercising of your business continuity plans It is best to set at minimum a yearly schedule at the outset of the program or planning initiation. Once the business continuity plans are at the end of their initial completion a tabletop walkthrough of the plan should be done.
I’ll be doing an upcoming article to provide more information and a deeper dive into conducting exercises soon.
In the meantime, please check the following articles on the Erwood Group Blog.
Each business continuity plan should be reviewed and updated annually to ensure it is maintained in perpetuity. Ideally, each plan will be updated as key changes to personnel, processes, technology, and other changes occur.
If done in this manner, an annual review will be easily done with a quick once over, a brief exercise, and updated per key findings that come out of post exercise debriefings.
It is important to note here that another key reason for business continuity plan failure occurs when the plan is not dutifully maintained and becomes out of date. Usually when this happens, it is no longer about updating the plan but creating a new one beginning the process over again.
Appendices with Supporting Documents, Tracking Logs, and Recovery Forms
The appendix is where you will want to keep key documents needed as part of the recovery process. This includes Vendor lists with contact information, tracking logs, and recovery forms.
Some Additional Information on Business Continuity
The below is some additional information about some key terminology used within the business continuity, contingency planning and disaster recovery industry.
The Business Continuity Plan, commonly referred to as a BCP in the business continuity planners within the contingency planning industry is an important document or series of documents utilized to recovery core business functions so that you can continue to provide goods and services to your customers at an acceptable level.
What is a Business Continuity Planner?
A business continuity planner is more of a loose phrase that also covers business continuity manager, business continuity analyst, contingency planner and many other such positions. A business Continuity Planner is the person who works within a business to organize, coordinate, develop, and create business continuity plans and programs. They are also charged with overseeing the future ongoing processes lifecycle, maintenance and improvement of the business continuity plans and programs.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
There are many that speak of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery interchangeably. However, the truth is they are more nuanced than that. Business Continuity really refers to the overall business functions and processes and keeping the business operations running while Disaster Recovery (DR) is really Information Technology specific. It is also referred to as ITDR. The ITDR focuses on applications, data, network infrastructure, data centers and all things IT related.
BCP vs DRP
Well, this is a bit more complex, as some vendors and providers like to spin or develop their own language around what is and isn’t something is. In the last several years, Disaster Recovery Plans (DRPs) have become synonymous with a Business Continuity Plan (BCP). We here at Erwood Group prefer to utilize the term BCP over DRP since the term Disaster Recovery is usually reserved for Information Technology and is also referred to as ITDR.
We have seen the use of the term DRP generate confusion in the businesses that use the term. This is one of the reasons why we recommend the term BCP over the DRP terminology.
However, the terminology used is also most often selected by the client and the use of this term is becoming more commonplace.
Let’s set the record Straight
BCP
As previously mentioned, we stated clearly what a BCP is. It is focused on continuing business operations at an acceptable level. BCPs are focused on the business processes and supporting tasks as well as the technologies that are utilized to complete them. It is not just a risk assessment or business impact analysis as those are separate documents. The RAs and BIAs are usually only just briefly mentioned within the Business Continuity Plans. Check our definitions at the top of the article if you’re still not sure what a Business Continuity Plan is.
DRP
Some people are stating that the DRP or Disaster Recovery Plan is the plan that is required to recover the business functions and processes. While this is incorrect and can cause confusion, it is becoming more common to use Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) to refer to the overall business recovery plan in place of calling it a business continuity plan. Where this causes confusion is that Disaster Recovery (DR) or Information Technology Disaster Recovery (ITDR) as mentioned above are intended to be technology specific.
So, when you’re referring to one over the other it is best to avoid confusion, especially during a crisis. When someone says “refer to your Disaster Recovery Plan” it is important to know exactly what they mean. This is why it is also important to keep your crisis communications simple and to the point. We hope you’ll agree and keep the language less confusing.
What Business Continuity Is Not
Another area of confusion created by some providers is that some of them sell appliances in hardware software, cloud-based, and other hybrid models as providing business continuity. While some of these appliances do assist with disaster recovery and some with business continuity to a specific area, there is no one single or multiple devices or appliances that provide real and complete business continuity to a business.
BCP Reporting
Business Continuity Plan Reporting is usually done at a rate the best applies to the business needs. Many will run monthly or quarterly reports as to the status of plans, exercises, and updates and yearly reviews. Most will perform this task yearly when annual reviews are due for accountability purposes.
Risk Assessment Reporting
Risk assessment reporting is usually done by an internal risk management team and reporting generally is reserved for executive management who are the primary target audience. Sometimes this is done quarterly. I recommend that if done infrequently businesses stay abreast and aware of emerging risks either internally or externally.
You can do this by subscribing to the Erwood Groups Annual Emerging Threat Report or through our weekly View 360 Report. Subscribe to both and stay up to date on all current and emerging risks that may impact your business.
Business Impact Analysis Reporting
Business Impact Analysis reports are presented to executives and business continuity program sponsors and stakeholders to provide both high-level and fine details of the current impacts the business faces. These are often done every three years or when BIAs are conducted.
Financial Impact Analysis
The Erwood Group specializes in and has developed proprietary tools to conduct Financial Impact Analysis for businesses along with our BIAs. This allows businesses to set better strategies and Recovery Time Objectives that are backed financially and provide a more effective cost-benefit analysis of the business recovery strategies.
Recovery Time Objective
The Recovery Point Objective (RTO) is a key finding that sets the timeframe from the declaration of an incident until the recovery of a business function or process.
Recovery Point Objective
The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) sets the amount of data in a specified period that a business can lose. For example, a four-hour RPO sets the acceptable loss of data at 4 hours.
Maximum Allowable Downtime
Maximum Allowable Downtime (MAD) is the maximum amount of time the business can have a function or process that is unavailable. It is usually the least common denominator, or the shortest RTO defined in the processes for that function. For example, if a business function has process 1 with an RTO of eight hours but process 2 at four hours the MAD would be 4 hours.
BCP Software
There are numerous companies and providers of BCP software available on the market. I have used nearly all of them in supporting various clients. The most common question is which is the best?
This really depends more on the business needs, the cost of the software over the life of the program, and the ease of using the software.
Generally, they all do the same thing. Assist you in creating, managing, and storing your business continuity plans.
They also present their own problems. Using software, it is easy to just go through it and select check boxes and move through the process without deeper expansion.
In many cases, it also presents a single point of failure as most businesses will only keep their business continuity plans within the software being used. I have seen this fail many times. Don’t allow your business continuity software to become your single point of failure.
In conclusion, I hope that this information is enough to get you started on building your business or organization’s business continuity plans.
If you still have questions or need additional help, please schedule a consultation and we’ll be happy to assist you.
So, what is business continuity anyway? It’s a great question. It’s also a question that comes up all the time. It should have a simple answer, yet the definitions and answers I hear are often long-winded and complex. So, what is business continuity? Before I give you my answer, let me provide you with the definition from the National Fire Protection Agency (NFPA) 1600 (Which is their Business Continuity Standard).
According to the NFPA 1600, Business Continuity is An ongoing process to ensure that the necessary steps are taken to identify the impact of potential losses and maintain viable recovery strategies, recovery plans, and continuity of services.
I like to keep things simple, so the above is the simplest of all the definitions out there. What do you think about the definition? Do you like it?
Yeah, me neither. As I said, I like to keep things simple. So, let me give you, my definition.
Now that we know that business continuity in its simplest form, is disaster preparedness for business; we need to discuss more how as a business we properly prepare for disasters and disruptions.
According to the DRII, Professional Practices are a body of knowledge that provides a framework to develop, implement, and maintain a business continuity program that reduces the likelihood for significant gaps and increases the cohesion of the business continuity program.
The Professional Practices are broken down into ten areas as follows:
Addressing each of the areas named above as part of your business continuity program increases your ability as a business to recover and operate the business. To continue to provide goods and services to your clients and limit potential losses to revenue, reputation, and customers.
Business Continuity Program Initiation
One of the most important parts of a business continuity program is getting it started in the right way. Doing so sets both you and your business up for a successful program.
Here is how to get your program started the right way.
Establish the need for a business continuity program
The first step is determining the need to start a business continuity program. While every business has the need and should have a business continuity program and plan, establishing the need for a program within the business is not always easily accomplished.
To establish a Business Continuity program, you will need to gain the support of others within your business.
Obtain support and funding for the business continuity program
Sometimes gaining support is easier said than done. Here is how to go about gaining support for your business continuity program. You will need to speak to your colleagues, managers, and executives within the business to obtain both support and funding for the business continuity program.
While business continuity is often looked at as a cost center in that it doesn’t directly attribute revenue to the business, it is an extremely important activity that reduces potential and real losses in revenue in several ways. It also reduces costs. Let me provide you with real examples that some of our clients have had results with.
One client recently obtained a $500 Million dollar increase in insurance coverage with zero increase in premium costs. This was done based on the Business Continuity Plans and Program developed after meeting with the insurance providers and providing details of the program and progress made.
Another client was able to reduce potential losses of over $149 Million by reducing Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) from 45 Days to just three days and planning accordingly resulting in a savings of 93% or $139 + Million Dollars. With the new strategies in place, the potential loss over three days was approximately $10.5 Million dollars. However, since the RTO was reduced to just three days, the likelihood of a loss in revenue was effectively reduced to zero since the customers being served would likely not leave based on just a three-day disruption. This assumption was made based on historical data from other national labs.
Additionally, many businesses are asked to meet business continuity and disaster recovery requirements from their customers that want them to ensure that the products and services they provide to them are met even after a disaster or disruption. This allows for businesses that have robust business continuity programs in place to increase their pricing as well.
One of the methods we use here at the Erwood Group is to provide our clients with a Financial Impact Analysis that allows them to visualize the monetary and economic value and utility of implementing a business continuity program. Additionally, we also like to educate them on the many ways in how business continuity provides value to a business.
Once we change the conversation with business executives and managers to how business continuity provides value and show various ways the business can reduce costs and obtain a return on investment (ROI) implementing a business continuity program just makes sense.
Build the organizational framework to support the business continuity program
Support from executives isn’t the only type of support you’ll be needing. An effective business continuity program needs to create an organizational framework, systems, methodology, teams, charters, and supporting statements and policies to be in place to support the needs and requirements of the program.
Additionally, you’ll need someone, preferably a team, that works on and within the business continuity program on a continual basis to keep the program running smoothly.
Charters. Polices, and Statements
Charters, Policies, and even statements can and should be created. The biggest question is which do you need? Ultimately it depends on the needs and requirements of your organization. However, at the very least you should have a general Business Continuity Statement that you can provide to customers that ask if your business has a business continuity plan or program in place. I’d also recommend having a client-facing business continuity statement on your website that is viewable to all current and potential future clients. Keep these statements at a very high level and provide a point of contact if someone wishes to formally ask deeper questions.
A business continuity charter outlines the overall program in its scope, timeline, standards used, its purpose, who heads it and has ownership, the departments, team members, or key players, the implementation of a steering committee, the lifecycle of the planning and program, the actual details of the framework to develop, implement, and maintain the plan and programs over time, and how often reviews and exercises will take place. Ultimately, it is a highly detailed document with executive approval and signed that details the processes of how the business continuity program will be run, managed, and overseen.
A policy is a high-level document that states business continuity is part of the business, is organizational-wide, and discusses standards and rules as enforced by the business. It is not as detailed as a program charter is.
Do you need a Charter and a Policy? No. However, if given a choice a charter with its details should be the first and optimal choice. If your organization requires a policy, you may opt to develop both or create a policy that has the depth of a charter.
Steering Committees
Depending on the size of your organization, or as a matter of policy within the organization you may need to or want to create and have the support of a steering committee for your business continuity program. In a smaller business there may not be a need for one, but in a large business with a lot of resources, moving parts, and constant changes it is almost a necessity.
It is usually best to have steering committee members made up of upper management teams that oversee the departments that will be involved in the business continuity program so that they add authority and convey the importance of getting the program off the ground and running smoothly.
In the beginning initial stages of the project, it may be necessary to meet more frequently, but ultimately meeting once per quarter is often enough.
How Many and What Departments Will Be Involved
This is the best time to start planning how many and which departments will be involved. What you want to do primarily is focus on core critical business functions. The difficulty arises when you have a large enterprise with many critical functions spread across the globe.
In the case of large global businesses with many critical core functions, it is best to start this planning early and this is how many larger companies run into trouble or get ‘Stuck’ in one of the phases of the business continuity program process. If you have gotten stuck – Learn How to Get Unstuck in Your Contingency Planning.
At this stage, it’s best to start planning your strategy for how you will move each department through each of the phases of the program. Usually, with 10 or more departments, I usually recommend breaking them into groups of five. This allows you to conduct your first set of Business Impact Analyses and then to quickly move this first group into a strategy selection phase while the BIA is still fresh in their minds.
The BIA phase is a key area where many businesses get stuck. They try to cycle everyone through the BIA phase before moving to the next phase. The reason this becomes an issue is it takes time to do over a large set of departments, functions, and groups. By the time you reach the end, often years later, the original BIAs become stale and irrelevant, and people also have forgotten what was discussed.
This also accounts for a lack of progress and therefore executive buy-in starts to wane and diminish as well.
Here’s what we at Erwood Group do. As we move the first cohort into the strategy selection phase, we also bring the second cohort into the BIA phase. We continually cycle each group through the phases this way to avoid getting stuck, to show progress, and keep executive buy-in, and group participation high. It allows others to see progress being made and achieved. It also assists in boosting results and maintains the momentum of the program.
As soon as you can determine what departments or functions will be taking part break them into smaller cohorts. Then begin laying out your project roadmap through the phases of the business continuity program.
Introduce key concepts, such as program management, risk awareness, identification of critical functions/processes, recovery strategies, training and awareness, and exercising/testing
This is also the best time to introduce and discuss the key concepts around developing and implementing your business continuity program. You’ll want to discuss the following with your colleagues and management.
Business Continuity Program Management
It’s important to lay the groundwork early on around how the business continuity program will be managed over the short-term including how the program will be initiated, developed, and progress into a long-term, everlasting program and how over time you will get there. It’s important to discuss as you will want to include these key details into the charter we discussed earlier.
Risk Awareness
You’ll want to address and raise risk awareness around the risks that the business faces as well as their impact on your business and operations. This is particularly important if you do not have a risk management team in place currently.
Identification of Critical Functions & Processes
Before proceeding with the various phases of the program initiation and development, time should be spent identifying core and critical functions and processes that are required to keep the business running.
These Functions and processes should be focused on:
Life Safety
Revenue Generating or Revenue Sustaining
Customer-Centric Contractual Agreements (SLAs)
Regulatory and Compliance Related
Other Legal Obligations
Note:In many cases, most businesses will need to worry about things like shelter-in-place or evacuation of people and that’s as far as their life safety concerns need to go. However, for other settings such as in healthcare facilities, life safety considerations need to be first and foremost prior to considering revenue generation. Not that revenue generation is not important in these facilities, but that life safety considerations need to be at the forefront.
Also, doing this early and having a clear determination on which functions and processes to consider for your business continuity program and which will have business continuity plans developed will prevent you from getting stuck on which areas of the business or organization should participate.
If not done with the outline presented above, you will, and still may face a lot of pushback from other functional areas that consider themselves critical. They may in fact be during normal business operations, but in the grand scheme of continuing operations during or post-disaster or disruption these will have little impact on the organization until operations return to normal.
Recovery Strategies
Now is the time to meet with executives to establish sensible and workable business continuity recovery strategies.
For instance, most businesses today declare that employees can work remotely, and this is perfectly fine. We just need to be sure that processes and systems are in place to handle this. Since the COVID-19 lockdowns have occurred, this is generally not an issue in most cases today.
However, some businesses can’t have every staff member work remotely. Such as manufacturers, laboratories, distribution centers, and other warehouse workers are needed to keep working at specific locations and in many cases, they require specific pieces of equipment to continue working.
In some situations, employees need to shift work to an alternate worksite. Considerations for notifying employees, and even providing transportation and/or accommodations to employees may be required as well.
You’ll need to select viable business continuity recovery strategies for the following areas:
People
Properties
Processes
Technology
Vendors
Training and Awareness
This is also a great time to begin to think about how you will conduct training and awareness within the business continuity program. There will be two key times for raising awareness and several opportunities to conduct training.
The first real opportunity to generate awareness will be to have business continuity program kick-off staff meetings. Holding these meetings is your best first chance at providing high-level awareness around the business continuity program, how it will be conducted, who will be participating, who at the executive level is supporting the effort, what resources are required, and how much time will be needed, and key the phases. Another key time for raising awareness is during exercises.
Depending on how you implement, develop, and run the program you’ll have several opportunities to provide training. There can be training provided prior to or during key phases of the program. The number one method of providing training throughout the program into the future will be during exercises.
Exercises, Training, and Testing
As we just mentioned, you will be conducting exercises once the plans are developed. This is done to look for weaknesses, gaps, learning (training), awareness, building confidence, developing new strategies, working with interdependent groups, discovering new interdependencies, and more.
While many use a “Crawl, Walk, Run” approach (I hate that saying) we at the Erwood Group developed our own methodology and system developed by our own Keith Erwood Called Learn, Practice, Implement, Challenge™.
The reason I hate the crawl, walk, run saying is that it is too vague and provides no real insight into what you should be doing during the exercises. It provides no information on what the overall goal of the exercise should be or at what stage in the process or program the teams are at.
This is the main reason why Learn, Practice, Implement, Challenge™ was created. It provides a clear set of objectives that should be happening at each stage. It also provides a logical progression of where we should be over time. Ultimately, the end goal of a mature program is that we should be able to hold exercises that push seasoned plans and their teams to grow and expand and find new ways or strategies to overcome any obstacle. It also provides a safe environment to learn (potentially to fail and learn in a safe way), and to build skills and confidence in the teams’ capabilities.
We’ll talk more about exercises later. Just know that the Learn, Practice, Implement, Challenge™ methodology can and should be implemented as part of the business continuity program development as well.
Risk Assessment
Risk Assessments are extremely important to conduct and it is in fact one of the reasons Why Business Continuity Plans Fail when they are not done or done inadequately.
A Risk assessment can be basic or complex as to its depth, but it should not be glossed over or skipped. If you’re part of a large organization that has some type of existing risk management team in place, partner with them to obtain the latest risks to the business.
If your business or organization has no risk management team or process in place visit the Chief Financial Officer as they are the ones responsible for operational risk and find out if a risk assessment has been done.
If no risk assessment has been done, it is easy to do a basic risk assessment. If you need a resource for this, you can click the link to obtain our free basic risk assessment. If you need something more robust for your risk assessment than our free resource, contact us to see if you require our Advanced Risk Assessment Tool.
One thing I want to add in this section is a brief statement on risk management. Risk management is important to all businesses. Done properly, risk management allows you to take advantage of upside opportunities, while mitigating downside or negative risks and outcomes.
Overall, risk management is looking at the impacts of what if this scenario occurs. And business continuity, as a subset of risk management and business preparedness preparations, is what we do when that situation occurs.
Identify risks that can adversely affect an entity’s resources or image
The purpose of the risk assessment is to identify the business or organization’s exposure to certain events (most likely negative at this stage) and put mitigation strategies in place to reduce the impacts
Additionally, we at the Erwood Group like to define the top five and top ten potential risks to a business or organization and directly call those out so risk mitigation and controls can be put into place.
Assess risks to determine the potential impacts to the entity, enabling the entity to determine the most effective use of resources to reduce these potential impacts
Once the risks and the probability of occurrence are assessed, we begin to look at the impacts on the business should these events occur.
This brings us to conducting an in-depth Business Impact Analysis.
Business Impact Analysis
The Business Impact Analysis commonly referred to as the BIA is one of the most important phases of your overall business continuity program. It is the method used to gather data about your core and critical functions and processes, essentially setting the foundation for your business continuity program and business continuity plans. You’ll use the BIA to gather all the data and information you require to analyze and make key decisions in the development of your business continuity plans.
Here are the key things you’ll be doing with your BIA.
Identify and prioritize the entity’s functions and processes in order to ascertain which ones will have the greatest impact should they not be available
The first step is to identify and prioritize the functions and processes within the business. You’ll then usually work with the most critical and core functions and processes first. This is especially true if you have many business functions and processes within your enterprise.
Assess the resources required to support the business impact analysis process
Prior to beginning the BIA you’ll need to identify the best resources and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) for each function and process.
You’ll need to schedule time for each resource and SME for interviews, completing surveys, and potentially completing workshops. It’s best to separate each cohort by department, function, and process to gather the necessary data and ask questions during the interview and workshops.
Key Data to Collect during the BIA
Recovery Time Objective
You’ll want to gather some very specific information during the BIA phase for each function and process. This includes:
Any Dependencies and Interdependencies on other internal or even external groups
Applications, Data, and other Technologies the process requires
What is the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of any data that is input into the system?
How many people are required to complete the process?
What vendors are relied on for this process?
You’ll also want key contact information, especially for vendors and key employees required to complete specific processes.
While many businesses try to collect the absolute minimum data required for expediency, we at the Erwood Group like to utilize the BIA phase to gather all key data we can during this time. This allows us to complete in-depth analysis, Financial Impact Analysis, Downtime calculations, and more. It also requires the same amount of effort and time, so collecting additional data during this phase just makes sense.
With that said, some people forgo the BIA entirely. This is not a good idea and is in fact one of the common reasons why business continuity plans fail as mentioned earlier. It’s better to do a rapid and minimalist BIA than to not do one at all.
Analyze the findings to ascertain any gaps between the entity’s requirements and its ability to deliver those requirements
Once the BIA is complete this is a time to look for obvious gaps in capabilities, lack of manual processes, and a heavy reliance on specific technologies, groups, or key people.
This is also a time to create a BIA report to share with team members, steering committees, stakeholders, and executives.
Business Continuity Strategies
The development of viable business continuity strategies is an essential part of building your business continuity plan. In fact, I would say it is the keystone required to build an effective plan.
As mentioned earlier you’ll need effective and viable strategies for the following areas:
People
Properties
Processes
Technology
Vendors
Select cost-effective strategies to reduce deficiencies as identified during the risk assessment and business impact analysis processes
Selecting cost-effective strategies as stated by DRII is important but selecting strategies that are effective and viable are just as if not more important. There are strategies that can be implemented that are in some cases zero or low cost, however, most strategies will incur some or significant costs.
For example, asking people to work from home (WFH) seems like a zero-cost solution, that when implemented thoughtfully and correctly requires at least some expense like laptops and VPN. When compared to the cost of an alternate location though, the cost is significantly less.
I’ll do a follow-up post on developing and selecting effective strategies in another post soon.
Incorporating Steps that support the strategies
Once you have the strategies selected you to need to add actionable steps that align and support those strategies that will be implemented.
These steps should be written in such a manner that would allow other team members or other personnel with the same skill sets to complete the steps should one of the main members of the team become unavailable.
For instance – rather than say we’ll relocate to an alternate location, say we will relocate to 123 location address, City, State, Zip.
Or rather than say we’ll utilize an alternate vendor, state something like the following:
Notify Vendor Name of need
Work with vendor to establish timeframe (to reach need or requirement)
Set or establish communication guidelines
Receive notification from a vendor that processes to support you are online (if needed)
Shift work, personnel, processes, etc. to vendor
Remember, the above is an example, but the more details and steps you have the more smoothly things will fall into place during a crisis. You don’t want someone to have to think through a missing step or requirement that will be needed.
Make certain you list any steps that would need to occur internally as well. Will approval be required to complete a step? Would you need to contact procurement? What about facilities? Lastly, be certain you communicate steps to the incident response team.
Incident Response
Once you complete your Business Continuity Plans, you’ll want to consider how you’ll respond to incidents and develop formal written plans on who is involved and how to respond.
There is quite a bit involved here, and though first responders and emergency responders have a formal set of incident response systems in place, organizations develop their response plans to fit their own internal and perceived needs. Due to this the private sector is literally all over the map on incident response.
I’ll cover a high-level overview of what your Incident Response Should look like in a separate post.
Develop and assist with the implementation of an incident management system that defines organizational roles, lines of authority and succession of authority
Some sort of incident response needs to be put into place to manage all the parts of an incident, be it a major disaster, a significant disruption to the business or operations of the business, or even a medical emergency on-site, as well as other potential incidents.
The first step will be to determine who will be on the Incident Response Team (IRT) and what each member’s role and responsibilities will be.
For instance, who will be appointed as an Incident Commander? Does this person have ultimate authority to run the incident, and make recovery decisions? If not, who does? What does that look like?
Do any of your personnel have experience with the Incident Command System (ICS) or Incident Action Planning (IAP)?
If you do not have anyone on your team that has experience in these areas I highly recommend taking the IS-100.C: Introduction to the Incident Command System, ICS 100 training available through FEMA. It is free and all members of your team should take the training.
Once you determine who will be on the Incident Response Team and what their roles will be you’ll also need to have an assessment team.
Incident Assessment
You’ll need a team to make initial assessments and ongoing assessments of the situation over time. You’ll also need to develop a formal written process and reporting document to make assessments to provide to the Incident Response Team.
These initial assessments can and should be done quickly by the assessment team. As an example, as a former first responder, we would always do a quick 10-second scene survey upon the first arrival at the scene of an incident. It’s a simple quick look around, what do you see, and what determinations can you make in that initial look?
For instance, if you had to evacuate a facility due to a fire, and it is actively burning and you can see flames and smoke, odds are your facility will be unusable and require repairs. It is possible during a later, secondary or tertiary assessment that it is determined that damage was less extensive and only to a specific portion of your facility and only a section or sections will remain unusable.
For a business organization, you should have someone knowledgeable and capable from facilities and information technology to be on your assessment team. Others may need to be added depending on the business type or industry as well.
Define requirements to develop and implement the entity’s incident response plan
Next, you’ll want to establish requirements for how you’ll develop and implement the incident response plan. When it will be activated, how it will be activated, how members will be notified of an incident, and the activation of the plan.
Over time, your incident will evolve and incorporate lessons learned from other incidents and protocols will be developed for when specific key things occur within your business.
Initially, you need some starting points as to how and when the Incident Response Team should meet. Additionally, they should be able to meet in person, virtually, and by phone or radio as needed.
Ensure that incident response is coordinated with outside organizations in a timely and effective manner when appropriate
At some point, you should exercise and coordinate with outside organizations when possible. At the very least you should have contact information for your local emergency responders, such as your local fire department, police station, office of emergency management, hospitals, utility providers, and more.
Reach out and talk to the local fire and police chiefs and invite them to come to visit your facility.
When an incident occurs, you will have members of your team speaking with and coordinating with these agencies.
You should also have certain information available to present as needed to responders. Some of this additional information could be:
Floor plans
Location of fire risers and standpipes
Location of any hazards or hazardous materials on site
Location of shelter in place
Plan Development and Implementation
When it comes time to develop and write your plans there are a few key things to know. First, when it comes to developing business continuity plans, especially for larger enterprise businesses plans should be developed by department or function. If this is not done, the plans tend to contain too much information and become too large, and that’s when people tend not to want to look at them.
That said, they should be filled with any pertinent information required to recover your business processes, instructions for manual workarounds, and other steps required to continue performing those functions.
If you’re a smaller or mid-sized business with fewer functions and processes, you can get away with developing a single plan for all your functions. But I strongly recommend as you grow, and the plan becomes harder to manage and maintain that you break it into small and more manageable department-based plans.
Document plans to be used during an incident that will enable the entity to continue to function
When you create and document your plans, you’ll again want to cover key specific areas that we previously mentioned:
People
Properties
Processes
Technology
Vendors
Each of the above should be a clearly defined section and lay out the previously selected strategies and supporting action steps for each strategy selected.
Traditionally, all plans were written or printed out and put into binders, and given to key personnel to carry with them at all times. This also presents some potential problems. The biggest issue is the size and weight of the document. No one wants to carry large binders around, especially when they have the perception, that they don’t need them today.
Some organizations have resorted to printing and carrying Quick Action Guides that detail initial responses and details of where to locate copies of plans. Others have resorted to paperless electronic versions and have done away with printed copies altogether. Some have resorted to using Business Continuity Software and only store plans within the software.
These solutions are fine but depending on how the documents are stored present other issues.
First and foremost, do not let your technological solution to business continuity become your biggest single point of failure. I have witnessed several clients store their documentation within their business continuity software solution only to be unable to access the documentation later when it’s needed most.
At the very least store the electronic documents in other locations. Create a repository on a shared drive or better yet, use geographically separate locations to store the electronic versions of your plans.
Keep additional copies in your physical Emergency Operations Center (EOC) if you have one. If you have a Virtual EOC (VEOC) make certain the documents are accessible there as well.
Utilize other methods as well such as push notifications, forced saving to a laptop or desktop, etc.
Of course, refer to your organization’s security and other related policies that relate to this.
Awareness and Training Programs
It’s essential to create effective Awareness and Training programs around your overall Business Continuity Program. The awareness and training should start early on by incorporating kick-off meetings that explain at a high level what will be taking place.
This helps to build awareness early on. At each key stage, some training should take place and it doesn’t need to be complex. It can be a simple overview of what will be occurring during the current or next phase.
As an example, as you get to the BIA phase you can have all or some of the participants attend a workshop explaining what you’ll be doing together. Show the participants the document you’ll be using which builds awareness and familiarity. Explain to them the information and data you’ll be looking for.
When it comes time to sit down with the members, you’ll be meeting to complete the BIA it will be easier to obtain the information you’re looking for. At the same time, you will be building on the previous awareness the participants have at each stage.
Establish and maintain training and awareness programs that result in personnel being able to respond to incidents in a calm and efficient manner
Once the plans are established, I find that it is helpful to put informational material together and send it out in the organization’s preferred method. Such as a monthly newsletter, a weekly chat message, a bulletin board, etc.
Some of the messaging could be:
Through contests where the first to answer correctly might win a prize
Messages about current disasters, and disruptions occurring in the world or to the organization
General details about current plan statuses’
Nonspecific (or very specific) details about what to do
Asking teams to run through a small scenario for 3 – 5 minutes – What would you do if/when?
Business Continuity Plan Exercise, Assessment, and Maintenance
Shortly after creating your business continuity plan, a tabletop exercise should be held. As I mentioned earlier in this article this stage is about learning and building additional awareness. You’ll be looking for gaps, additional interdependencies, and weaknesses within the plan.
Overall and over time throughout the remainder of the business continuity program I like to use the Learn, Practice, Implement, Challenge™ methodology I implemented for conducting exercises, assessments, and ongoing maintenance of the plans.
Establish an exercise, assessment, and maintenance program to maintain a state of readiness
The establishment of a program to exercise, assess, and maintain the plans should be built into the overall business continuity program itself and should be called out and detailed in the business continuity program charter.
Ideally, you should be holding annual exercises at a minimum. Each of these exercises should be progressing through the Learn, Practice, Implement, Challenge™ stage of the exercise methodology. Some plans and teams might need to conduct several stages of practice and implementation of the plans, but the goal should be to achieve a point where teams and plans can be challenged to achieve future success and enhance current strategies.
After each exercise, an assessment should be done (post-incident assessment or after-action review) and clear objectives, outcomes, and lessons learned should be documented.
The plan should then be updated according to the outcomes to make the existing current plans better. The new version should be documented, dated, and signed off on by plan owners and reviewers.
Additionally, a formal process should be documented as to who owns the plans and that person should be responsible for yearly reviews and plan maintenance.
Ideally, plans should be maintained and updated as changes occur to personnel, processes, technology, and vendors. If done as it happens, they are much easier to maintain over time and less likely to become stale and outdated.
Crisis Communications
Making crisis communications part of your business continuity plan and the program is another essential element to a successful program.
It is much easier to communicate during a crisis rapidly and effectively if you establish crisis communications frameworks and templates ahead of time. Rather than potentially omitting key information or providing incorrect information and making a mistake.
Provide a framework for developing a crisis communications plan
Start with building a framework and team around crisis communication. Select who will be on that team and appoint key spokespeople to make statements internally and externally.
You may need to separate and provide guidelines around internal and external crisis communications as well. Ideally, internal communications will come from key people depending on the situation.
Externally there will be times you want the CEO to make statements and there will be times you do not want the CEO to make a statement. Some businesses may choose to have the CEO always be the public spokesperson, and some may elect to never have the CEO do this. In any case, the spokesperson should have some training.
You will want to establish general information to communicate to employees as to what they should say or how to respond if approached by the media, or anyone else. You also want to send out reminders to employees as needed.
Create templates to communicate to internal and external recipients so that the communication is effective, addresses the key information about an event as needed.
Ensure that each message ends with a date and time the next expected communication is to take place. And, if multiple people are making statements, they remain consistent in the messaging. Ideally, it is best to select one spokesperson and an alternate.
Ensure that the crisis communications plan will provide for timely, effective communication with internal and external parties
In addition to the information above make certain that additional updates will be made in a timely manner. In major, rapidly changing events it is normal to provide an hourly update. However, information and situations can evolve rapidly. Sometimes it is best to let the media or others wait on an update (but not for too long) to know that an update will be delayed by ten or fifteen minutes. Optionally, early on it is best to state the next update will be provided in 3 hours or more. Make the cadence of the updates part of your framework.
One important additional item for internal communications. You will experience update requests from managers, frontline workers, stakeholders, customers, etc. as to when you can expect a specific process, technology, application, product, or service will become available again.
I will leave you with these three key points regarding this:
You will not want to repeatedly interrupt the people implementing recovery strategies to ask them when it will become available. Work this into your plans and how this is reported and managed.
Develop a system to provide notification to pertinent individuals when these things become available again.
Always end each official update with a time or date and time as to the next update. Make no other updates until that time.
Coordination with External Agencies
Finally, once you have everything else in place, your plans, your incident management team, your crisis communications, and you have practiced a few times you will want to include external agencies when you can in your exercises.
Additionally, you’ll want to make sure that your incident response team is ready to speak to and coordinate with external agencies as well.
Establish policies and procedures to coordinate incident response activities with public entities
Ideally, you can create and incorporate policies and procedures on how to coordinate the incident response with external agencies.
Include policies and procedures on communicating with Fire officials on the scene. You may even want to ask them what their needs will be ahead of time and make certain that information is available on their arrival.
Do police, Paramedics, EMTs, and other first responders know their way around your campus? If not, who will meet them and escort them where they need to go?
How will you coordinate if utility companies need to respond?
Do you know other key agency details and contact information such as hazardous material response teams? Local Office of Emergency Management? Your local Emergency Operations Centers?
So What is Business Continuity Anyway?
Now I hope you learned that business continuity is preparedness for business and you now have the method in which to implement it in your business.
Here at the Erwood Group, we’ve created a new exercise methodology. A new paradigm for the way a business exercises, trains, and prepares for a crisis. It is called Learn, Practice, Implement, Challenge™ – The new exercise methodology to Increase Your business endurance.
Now, go ahead and tell me what you mean by that exactly, and I bet you’ll have some trouble.
“Crawl, walk, run”is a phrase I commonly hear especially around exercises. It’s a phrase that I hate. It’s just too vague, overly simplified, and completely nondescriptive, leaving out key details about just how we are supposed to progress through to something bigger and better. Can you tell me what you’re supposed to be trying to achieve?
Of course, you can’t.
That’s why many years ago I came up with the phrase Learn, Practice, Implement, Challenge™ which provides not only the descriptive details but the overarching goal of what we’re trying to accomplish with each stage of our exercise progression.
First and foremost, we have our Learning stage:
Learn
Sounds simple enough. At this stage, we teach our new plan owners and participants what they should be doing. Learning. It is designed to get everyone in the same place. As a team. They learn they have a plan, what is in the plan, where to find the plan, how to update and maintain the plan (and who is responsible for that maintenance), and we go through the plan, especially the strategy section and steps based on the strategies.
At this point we walk the participants through each strategy, asking questions about the strategy validity, any potential for this not to work, dependencies required for the strategy to work, and any additional strategies or sub-strategies we can add.
Next, we walk through each step required to implement the strategies. Making sure details needed are captured and not left too vague makes the information impractical at best and unimplementable during a crisis at worst. For instance, if a recovery strategy calls out the reliance on a secondary vendor that vendor should be called out by name. And then tertiary vendors and so on. Think in terms of, if someone else other than my main team members had to implement this plan, what information would they need?
At the end of this exercise, we still conduct an after-action review and collect all the appropriate data such as lessons learned, what went well, what worked, what didn’t and how can we improve. We’ll also ask if they would like to add any additional input and what kinds of other disruptive events have, they experienced in the past. All of this is done to create familiarity and training for future exercises as well. The entire process is about having the participants learn new skills and improving their current existing plans.
Once these learning stage exercises are conducted and the plans updated to reflect the exercise outcomes and additional strategies the work begins to set up the next round of future exercises for the practice stage.
Practice
Usually taking place about a year after the learning stage, the practice phase starts to get a little bit more intense. Still, in a tabletop setting in most cases, the participants are expected to know how to access their business continuity plans, how to access information within the plan, and how to walk through the steps to invoke the plan successfully. This is usually done and presented as part of a scenario impacting the business and forcing the plans to be activated.
At this practice stage, the idea isn’t to do anything too hard but to present the exercise, have the team attempt to achieve a predetermined set of goals, and even guide them into the next steps through a series of questions or injects. They may do so exceedingly well or may fail and learn a series of lessons. The idea though is to allow them to practice their plan in a controlled environment where they can feel safe and make mistakes. But not to push them to the brink where it becomes a stressful overwhelming event where they learn nothing and feel defeated.
In some cases, it may be necessary to hold several practice sessions with the team before moving on to the next stage of maturity in the exercise progression. Perhaps twice a year or more. More on this later in another post.
The point is some teams will need to practice a few times before their comfort and confidence levels allow them to move onto the implementation stage. As with the learning stage, we hold an after-action review session immediately following each exercise.
Implement
Next, will be to implement the plans during an exercise. Here we start with what is the overall purpose of the exercise, as in, what are we exercising? Are we testing the ability to send notifications? Implement strategies? Can the steps be followed that are needed to initiate and complete the strategy? Can vendors be notified and coordinated with? Can customers be notified and coordinated with as expected? Can key personnel go to and work from an alternate location or remotely?
For all these implementations and more, are they successful? Did they fail? If so, why? Can the cause of the failure be easily determined? What worked well? What didn’t? Where is there room for improvement? How were internal communications? Were there errors? What were they? Did we use alternate applications to access information? How did that go? Are we tracking things manually? Did it work effectively? Where are there stumbling blocks and bottlenecks?
So, to summarize this section, Implementation exercises are exactly that, implementation of parts of the plan such as a select strategy, communications internally or externally, notifications to team members or other teams, or the implementation of the whole or parts of the plan that would be needed to fit the scenario.
Once teams have had the opportunity to implement their plans, we will start to Challenge them.
Challenge
The challenge phase is exactly what it sounds like, we create a scenario or series of scenarios that begin to challenge the plan owners and participants. This is done to expand the teams’ capabilities, build massive confidence, and the capability to learn and improvise based on what they know and the strategies available to them within the plan.
This challenge phase is never done with the idea of forcing the team to the brink and forcing failure, but to provide a safe learning environment to expand their capabilities. In other words, don’t make it so impossible that they do fail, but challenging enough that it forces them to think, act, and improve upon what is there so they can be ready for real incidents should they arise. Put another way, the challenge level exercises should elevate the team involved and make them better for participating in the exercise.
I’ve seen some exercise designers and facilitators develop exercises where they knock-off (kill) many or all key personnel, make it impossible to contact vendors, and inject failure at every turn. Not that some of these things can’t happen. They do. But the idea is to provide a positive learning experience for the people involved.
If they aren’t learning at every stage or phase along the way and are just placed in a stressful situation where failure is the only or main outcome, they will walk away unhappy, discouraged, with less confidence, and less likely to look forward to or participate in another exercise.
In fact, if this has been the case, you may need to reinitiate the exercises at the learn or practice phase level again just to build up your team.
As part of our challenge phase as businesses mature in the exercise phase to improve their preparedness, we offer world-class training and exercise to take their endurance to the next level. We have partnered with an academy award-winning special effects team to create real-world events and scenarios in a safe and controlled environment.
Keith Erwood is the COO, Co-Founder, and Principal Managing Consultant of the Erwood Group. The Erwood Group focuses on business preparedness, business continuity, disaster recovery, and crisis management. We create enduring businesses that Prepare, Prevent, Profit through planning, mitigation and exercising. #Endurance>Resilience
The View 360 Report is our weekly subscriber-only Business Intelligence Report. Designed to provide the reader with Situational awareness of emerging threats that could impact their business and personal lives. Unlike other reports that just bring you the potential threats and risks, we provide direct actionable measures to mitigate the impact to your business and life.
View 360 is also designed to supplement our yearly Emerging Threat Report (sold separately) published in January of each year.
The contents of each View 360 Report are sent out to subscribers each week in an easy-to-read PDF text-based format. It includes a Situation Awareness Points Overview where we highlight each threat in bullet point form, below that we go through each bullet point highlighting the details of the threat including our opinion on the topic and what to expect, along with an occasional deeper insight providing additional comments, then finally actionable measures where we provide details on mitigations that can be implemented. Then we provide a Cyber Event update on cyber events that have occurred since the last View 360 Report. Next, we bring you information surrounding planned protests around the United States detailing the cause, the place and time the event is happening and the latest intelligence on how many are planning to attend or how many are interested in the protest. Finally, we bring you our weather outlook for the week.
We have also started a private Facebook-based group for subscribers only where we can provide additional updates on key events daily as well as host discussions.
Currently, subscribers can try the View 360 Report for free for 14 days and then will be charged $49 per month thereafter. You can subscribe directly to the View 360 Report here. Cancel at any time.
Yesterday, I shared some Golden Nuggets on the benefits of exercising your Crisis Teams and why we exercise. Today, I am going a little deeper on another major hidden and often overlooked benefit that exercises create.
Confidence.
Whether this is for Crisis Teams, Incident Management teams (or whatever you like to call your team), Business Continuity Teams, and especially Information Technology Disaster Recovery (ITDR) teams. Frequent, repeated exercises build confidence.
Confidence among the team(s) themselves, confidence in managers and executives of the business, and confidence from your customers and business partners. The most important place to build this confidence is among the teams that are doing the recovery work.
As you might expect, a lack of conducting exercises among your teams has the opposite effect. It can cause your team to break down and literally destroys their confidence, which also negatively impacts recovery times and overall recovery.
Let me provide some deeper insight by using an example from some previous work I did.
Several years ago, I was consulting for a major airline assisting some of the IT teams to develop Disaster Recovery Plans, getting them to move beyond tabletop walkthroughs and doing “functional” exercises, as well as documenting the exercise to get credit during an audit.
It is important for me to state here that this was a project based on an internal audit outcome. I was working with the bottom performers on remediation based on that audit. These were groups that either:
Had zero plans in place
Never conducted an ITDR exercise beyond a tabletop walkthrough
Conducted a functional exercise but didn’t document it properly and received no credit for doing the exercise
I want to talk about a particular group within that project that I worked with and why they never conducted anything more than a tabletop walkthrough, and why they lacked confidence and were afraid to even think of doing anything functional.
During my first meeting with this group, I specifically asked the simple question:
Why haven’t you done a functional failover exercise in the past?
The reply may come as a surprise to many of you but didn’t surprise me at all. The response they provided to me was that they weren’t allowed to do anything beyond a tabletop walkthrough.
My follow-up question to them was, who said that they were not allowed to conduct a functional exercise?
The Response: “The Business” (specifically operations).
After some discussion, I learned that the “business side” in the operations leadership felt that the systems and application were too critical to do a functional failover exercise while the application was running in production.
However, the systems and application weren’t deemed or signed off as an application that was too critical to for such an exercise. Yet, every time the team submitted a request to conduct a functional failover exercise operations would reject it and say it was too critical.
Normally, with a set of systems and or applications that the business deems too critical to complete these failover exercises they elevate them as such, and the business signs off on it as well as accepting the risk of not having these exercises done.
Not really the best decision as there are ways to do these exercises even while in production. But that is not the purpose of this story.
You see, this team not only lost confidence but felt a distrust in their capabilities from business leadership. So much so. that after working with them in both the development of a runbook and tabletop walkthrough that when I proposed having them submit permission to conduct a functional failover exercise, I was told, “there’s no point, they’ll never sign off on it.”
I told them, let me worry about that, you just pick a date and submit the request.
Behind the scenes, I was working with my engagement manager to either get the business to approve the request, or bump the criticality up to properly accept the risk, and sign off on it.
We got the approval.
Over the next 30 days, I worked with that team on their runbook to ensure that every step was in there and that they knew how to properly document and track the failover exercise, including backout procedures.
When the day of the exercise came, they performed wonderfully and did everything right.
They hit a glitch late into the exercise and couldn’t do a 100% successful failover. But did achieve the following:
They learned a lot. They ran into several issues during the exercise and were able to overcome them and move forward
They properly documented what they were doing. Conducting log capture, taking screenshots of before and after states, taking notes as they moved through the process for later use
Completed an after-action and discussed lessons learned, things that went wrong, and things that went well
All of this, even though the outcome wasn’t a successful failover during the exercise. They learned immensely during the exercise. They learned they could depend on one another to complete their assigned tasks. And the business learned they could trust the team to do the failover exercise, without disrupting the production environment.
The most important part. They were happy as a team and gained massive confidence in their own capabilities. This allowed them to continue to conduct exercises, gain further confidence and learn new skills.
In the end, a successful exercise isn’t always about a successful failover or other such success. In fact, you can learn a great deal when you fail. And when you learn and build the lessons into your plans, that is when the real success comes.
That, and the confidence you gain will boost you and your team during the next exercise or incident.
So. Get out there. Exercise and build confidence in yourself and your team.
The reasons why we exercise are often varied yet sometimes misunderstood by many. Below I will share some of the many reasons why we exercise and perhaps you’ll gain some insights into Why We Exercise.
Let me let you in on a little secret – A Golden Nugget – even the professionals make mistakes.
This is at all levels, in all industries, it even holds true in sports.
But what I am talking about specifically here are first responders and emergency managers. We all make mistakes.
Why am I telling you this? Perspective!
First Responders and Emergency Managers consistently drill, practice, and run exercises regularly. Yet they still make mistakes. They also have great outcomes, but they do make mistakes.
After each exercise, drill, or real incident they hold a debriefing. This is done whether it was a tabletop or a large-scale multi-agency functional exercise or a real incident.
The debriefing covers:
What went well
What went wrong
How can we do better
This worked great and we should implement it more
What did we learn – Lessons Learned
What are your takeaways
Let’s revisit and have a conversation on what we need to improve on
The reason why they exercise so often is because make mistakes. It’s also part of training and educating. Taking corrective action and using criticism and critique in a positive way. The repetition of doing assists both actual memory and muscle memory. Some actions also become habit. These habits can be both good and bad. It’s also an excellent way of highlighting bad habits so they are corrected.
When it comes to businesses, crisis teams don’t exercise nearly enough. Many will do this once, maybe twice per year. And if they do, that’s a lot.
But more than just frequency alone crisis teams in the business world need to also take a different approach and outlook. Every exercise should be looked at as an opportunity to learn, expand skillsets, stepping beyond comfort zones, and training for the future.
Additionally, every exercise does not need to be disruptive. It can be as simple as getting in a room, conference call, or zoom/teams/insert your other favorite video conference provider and having a discussion that asks:
What do we do when (insert event or impact)
How will we handle (insert event or impact)
Are we prepared for (insert event or impact)
Have we considered (insert event or impact)
In fact, this can be done far beyond crisis teams. Each of your departments and teams that hold regular team meetings or get-togethers can take 3, 5, 10, or even 15 minutes to discuss topics depending on what is on the regular agenda. This can be done every meeting, every-other meeting, or even quarterly.
You’ll see changes to your planning and preparedness levels. You might even see changes to your long-term culture. Trust me that’s a good thing.
Over the past few years, business leaders have been reminded repeatedly of the unpredictability of doing business in an uncertain future. This has certainly been the case for the past two years as business owners faced devastation from both humanitarian and natural disasters.
As the world gets riskier, being prepared for disruptions and disasters impacting your business is extremely important. Why? In addition to preventing severe financial losses, it can prevent companies from “closing their doors”.
To celebrate April’s Financial Literacy Month, I will share examples of what happens when you do not have a plan and outline strategic steps on how to build a resilient organization during the next crisis.
NOT PLANNING FOR THE UNEXPECTED
Even seemingly small events can have major impacts on a business. Consider the following events causing major impacts to businesses:
A car hit a fire hydrant in front of an antique bookstore causing damage to 1,500 antique books costing $300,000 in restoration and repairs.
A bad database upgrade and upload resulted in the database transaction processing idled for seven days; resulting in the loss of two major clients.
Even a trader was impacted by a power loss at his home. Due to the outage, he was unable to execute a trade to exit a position and lost $70,000.00 in a single day.
Tessco Technologies
Let’s look at what happened with Tessco Technologies, a supplier of wireless communications products for network infrastructure, site support, and fixed and mobile broadband located in Baltimore, Maryland. The business was not in a flood, fire, or earthquake zone. In this case, the culprit was a faulty fire hydrant, which caused several hundred thousand gallons of water to be blasted through a concrete wall leaving the company’s primary data center under several feet of water. It also left 1400 hard drives, and 400 SAN disks soaking wet and caked with mud and debris.
PREPARE, PREVENT, PROFIT
Businesses don’t need to be located in a disaster zone to be impacted by a disaster. The key to protecting your business is to prepare with a plan that is well documented and has strategies you can rapidly put into place.
Below are five reasons why business leaders should prepare:
Quickly respond and adjust to a disaster or disruption with strategies that allow you to shift and pivot your business for a more expedient recovery
Reduce or even eliminate financial losses by implementing strategies that reduce the impacts
Obtain better insurance rates and coverage for instant Return on Investment (RIO)
Meet government, regulatory, and customer requirements calling for contingencies
Maintain business reputation and share price
A well-documented plan can help you quickly respond, adjust, and pivot to alternative strategies. As part of proper planning, it is important to know what the delayed and lost revenue to your business will be as well as the potential for increased expenses and other recovery-based costs that will impact your business.
The first step is to calculate what your downtime costs would be. This is usually directly representative of lost revenue. It is important to note that even delayed revenue can have a significant impact on a business’ cash flow, whether daily, weekly, or monthly. Even if all your income is only delayed, having a reduction to cash flow can shut a business down quickly.
By taking the time to do even basic downtime calculations you can begin to take steps to protect your revenue-generating processes.
ASSESSING THE FINANCIAL IMPACTS OF BUSINESS DISRUPTIONS
Many organizations skip the Financial Impact Analysis. This is a mistake. Conducting a Financial Impact Analysis is critical to helping a business understand the actual financial impact a disaster or disruption can have on a business. With this process, businesses can select strategies to enable a recovery that makes sense financially and gives leaders peace of mind that no matter what uncertainties the future may bring, organizations will thrive and even profit for years to come. Let’s take a look at the top five:
Providing insight into Business processes and Applications that when impacted by disruption will cause the business to have lost or delayed revenues
This first step will allow a business to determine estimated or in some cases exact dollar amounts in lost and delayed revenue from a disruption. Even a basic calculation of these lost revenues can quickly inform a business where they can and should focus their preparedness efforts. Notice this is preparedness, not recovery efforts. This is because a large part of getting this right is done during the preparedness phase pre-disaster.
Allows for proper cost-benefit-analysis of (to implement) right-sized recovery strategies
This calculation then allows the business to focus its strategies on key critical core functions that are most likely to be impacted by revenue losses and cash flow issues. This deeper insight helps the business to focus resources, time, and money on these critical functions with better data backup, record retention, and manual recovery strategies rather than through resources in business areas randomly that may not need as much or any strategies.
Potentially reduced insurance premiums along with increased insurance coverage
Additionally, presenting your insurance company with a well-thought-out preparedness plan in many cases can reduce your insurance coverage premiums, provide you with increased coverage, or both. Just recently I helped a large Biotechnology company obtain an additional $500M in coverage for a total of $2B in total Property and Casualty Insurance Coverage with zero additional increase to their premiums.
Better insight for the selection of Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs), Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs), and Maximum Allowable Downtime (MAD)
Another key benefit is rather than selecting arbitrary Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) for your business processes or Information Technology Disaster Recovery (ITDR), you can tie these to your financial impacts and set clear goals that are meaningful to your business.
This would allow you to implement a preparedness or IT recovery strategy that enables you to recover in the time you need and more importantly, save money.
Greater ability to measure effective Return on Investment (ROI) of Business Preparedness Measures
When you take the time to do even basic financial impact calculations, it also becomes much easier to measure and obtain better ROI. Yet, many do not take the time to do these calculations because they believe it is too difficult, they don’t know where to start, or even how to apply the outcome of these calculations.
MAKE YOUR BUSINESS MORE RESILIENT
At the Erwood Group, our business is helping your business stay up and running after and ideally during a crisis or disruption. Whether you need help with business continuity planning, crisis, and incident management, or need better disaster recovery options, we’ve got programs and services to make your business more resilient so that you can prepare, prevent and profit even in a disaster.
To celebrate April’s Financial Literacy Awareness month, I am offering a free consultation to help your business survive the next disaster and provide critical strategic steps to prepare, prevent and profit in an uncertain and unpredictable future.
Contact Keith Erwood,Business Preparedness Expert, ERWOOD GROUP.
Supply Chain Disruption Forcing San Diego Businesses to Make Tough Decision this Holiday Season
Local Crisis Management Expert Believes Distributions Challenges Are an Opportunity, Not a Crisis.
The Halloween decorations have been put away and we are now entering the holiday shopping season. Sticker shock will be this year’s theme, if you can find what your looking for that is.
SAN DIEGO—The global supply chain crisis, which includes thousands of unloaded containers with merchandise lingering on ships in major US ports, coupled with skyrocketing gasoline prices, a worker shortage, and a huge increase in consumer demand, is forcing local companies to make some tough decisions heading into the competitive holiday season.
According to Crisis Management and Business Continuity Expert, Keith Erwood, Business Preparedness Expert of ERWOOD GROUP, companies must decide three important questions: will they pay higher prices upfront to receive overseas goods, pass the increased costs onto their customers, or retreat from overseas markets, all together.
Keith Erwood: “Our data and research indicate, things will get worse before they get better. However, the supply chain disruption should be viewed as an opportunity, not a crisis, for our San Diego business owners. There are steps companies can make to ensure resiliency and identify key strategies you can take to build a stronger supply chain.’
To help local businesses survive this holiday season, Crisis Management Expert, Keith Erwood, Business Preparedness Expert of ERWOOD GROUP has outlined strategic steps to handle the supply chain disruption:
Diversity of Supply Base
To help untangle the global supply chain mess, businesses need to move away from depending on a single supplier overseas, like China or Vietnam and find local suppliers where possible to fill critical components or materials. This is because local suppliers can deliver products much quicker. It is also easier for a supplier to coordinate a shipment across the neighborhood than around the world.
Forecast Demand
Companies need to focus on delivering quality best-selling products to their consumer-base, instead of trying to keep shelves packed with non-essential slow-moving items.
Erwood said, “There is a false narrative being shared in the media right now that holding and buying increased inventory will allow businesses to meet high demand over the holidays. This is a mistake. If demand for a product decreases, deep inventory can become a financial liability and environmental waste. This is especially true for technology, fashion, and perishable products that rapidly lose value and salability over time.”
Be Honest
Research and data at the ERWOOD GROUP predict supply chain imbalances will continue into June 2022, due to inflation, workers shortage, and the impact of the Delta variant around the world—especially in South Asia.
Erwood said, “For this reason, you must be very honest with your customer, even when it hurts.
Plan for Recovery
Companies should think beyond short-term disruption to long-term company survival. Disruption can be seen as an opportunity to thrive and make tough business decisions, like a long-desired reorganization or cutting non-performing products and customers.
Buy Local
It’s no secret supply chain issues have taken a toll on small businesses importing materials. For this reason, San Diego consumers must start buying from local businesses to change how they operate. By relying less on goods and services from outside markets you can boost regional and local economies.
GUEST BOOKING:
Keith Erwood is available for live guest segments. To schedule your interview, please contact, Kristi Angevine, Publicist, ERWOOD GROUP at kangevine@gmail.com
About ERWOOD GROUP
At the Erwood Group, our business is helping your business stay up and running after and ideally during a crisis or disruption. Whether you need help with business continuity planning, crisis, and incident management, or need better disaster recovery options, we’ve got programs and services to make your business more resilient so that you can prepare, prevent and profit even in a disaster. For more information visit erwoodgroup.com