Finalizing Your Organisation Consolidated Business Continuity Strategy

Finalizing Your Business Continuity Strategy

This section is part of the BL-B-5 Module 3 Pre-reading List.   This is in preparation of the compilation and presentation of Business Continuity (BC) Strategy report to Executive Management.  This is the first part of the BC Strategy reading.

When you completed the BL-B-3 Module 2, you have the competency of a BU BCM Coordinator as you have completed the BC Strategy Questionnaires. You have also understood the objectives and challenges of completing the BC Strategy Questionnaires at the business unit level.  In Module 3 and 4, you are assuming the role of an Organization BCM Coordinator and is required to analyse and present the BC Strategy findings as a report to Executive Management for approval.

The content is extracted from the BCM Planning Series: Developing Recovery Strategy for Your Business Continuity Plan.

Validate Business Continuity (BC) Strategy Development

This blog provides the basic know-how to validate the Business Continuity (BC) Strategy once they are developed. You are expected to received individual BC Strategy submission from each business unit.  The assumption is that the BU BCM Coordinators had their submission reviewed and endorsed by the respective Head of BU.

Understand Issues to be Considered

The following issues must be considered during this BC Strategy stage:

• What is the total time taken to declare a disaster?
• Is the staff members available following a disruption?
• What will be the restriction when there is any relocation of staff members?
• Does the alternate site have capacity to accommodate more operations should the stay be extended?
• Is working from home (WFH) arrangement suitable for the specific critical business functions?
• Is technology and internet access available while working from home?
• What is the maximum time that the business unit is allowed to stay at the alternate site?
• What is the time taken and resources needed to implement the BC Strategy?
• Are there existing processes to recover?
• Do we need to develop additional standard operating procedures?

It is important that all outstanding issues are clarified. This includes the way forward agreed upon prior to commencing the next stage.

I often use a flip chart named “parking lot” to list the outstanding issues during training sessions. Participants must be delegated to address the items on the list and you will need to monitor the completion of the tasks.  Some of these issues are long-term and may need more time to resolve with management apporval.

Validate Interoperability

There is a need to verify the interoperability of each specific BC Strategy operating outside if the primary site to the following:

• Similarity to the actual operating environment
• Deployment of resources
• Relevance to existing operating procedures
• Inclusion in contractual agreement

Determine Data Loss Scenario

An organization’s BC Plan will minimize the impact of a disaster. Yet, there is always a possibility that some data could be lost in a disaster. It is therefore critical to identify the potential loss of data for your critical business function.

The capability to recover your critical business function will rely heavily on your ability to identify and re-construct the lost data or to re-create the data from other forms such as manually written documents.

Discussions with the BU BCM Coordinators and their managers will help the BU Coordinators to determine the types of data that may be lost during any interruption especially when it occurs after office hours.

Appendix 10: Data Loss Scenario gives details of some of the issues that should be considered.

These include:

• Dependency on work-in-progress and data left onsite
• Inability to recover lost data
• Inability to reconstruct lost data and process back log
  
  

The BCM Project Manager or Organization BCM Coordinator will need to explain the data loss scenario to the BU BCM Coordinators as they need to provide inputs to the following questions:

• When did you last back up your data?
• How frequently is data transferred offsite?
• Is the data stored offsite or onsite?
• Can you access the backup data during weekends and public holidays?
• If data (document) is destroyed on a working day, can you still reconstruct the data offsite? If “no”, how can you survive?
• Do you have a full understanding of the issues and limitations?
• Is there adequate documentation on the processing?
• Is the necessary skillset and knowledge retained within the organization?

Identify Operational Changes

The Organization BCM Coordinator has to identify operational changes that are necessary to carry out strategy development. These include:

• Revise existing standard operating procedures that are affected by the adoption of the newly developed recovery strategy
• Increase cross training of team members
• Reorganize or even re-engineer the work flows
• Update performance standards
• Increase protection of work-in-progress