After the business units return the BIA Questionnaires and the Organization BCM Coordinator completes an initial analysis, interviews should be conducted to verify the completeness and accuracy of the information. These interviews are intended to identify any discrepancies in the information collected.
Face-to-face interviews with the BU BCM Coordinators are strongly recommended in a BIA. In addition to interviewing key participants, the Organization BCM Coordinator should also meet other supporting staff members and experts in their area of work.
The results should be provided to Heads of BU for their review. It is important that the relevant Executive Management Members or Heads of BU are willing to defend the results if required.
The Organization BCM Coordinator should plan to spend at least one to two hours with each interviewee. Group interviews of personnel with related positions can expedite the interview process and may provide a less threatening environment than one-on-one interviews. Issues raised by one team member may jog the memory of another interviewee, thereby uncovering a critical issue that would otherwise have been overlooked.
The interviews should follow the same format. The Organization BCM Coordinator should attempt to verify the impact of tangible and intangible losses.
I often find the scheduling of meetings well in advance to be beneficial. A sample interview schedule is shown below:
Period | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri |
9:00 am to 10:30 am | |||||
10:30 am to 12:00 pm | |||||
2:00 pm to 3:30 pm | |||||
3:30 pm to 5:00 pm |
The Timetable for BIA Interview
You have to ask the right questions to generate relevant answers. The following are possible questions that the Organization BCM Coordinator can ask:
It is observed that after a serious disaster, all or most functions that were initially suspended are gradually resumed. To facilitate restoration of operations, the Executive Management should assign a “rank” to various business functions, based on how long the organization can survive without each one. Once you understand the risk profile you can define the business function into one of three categories of activities:
A disruption in service not exceeding four hours would jeopardize seriously the operations of the organization. This business function must be recovered within four hours following the disaster.
A disruption of service exceeding one day would seriously jeopardize the operation of the organization. This business function must be recovered within one day after the disaster.
This function would be convenient to have but would not seriously detract from the operating capabilities if it were missing. This business function must be recovered with one week after the disaster.
Another approach is to define the criticality of those business functions that can and those that cannot tolerate the maximum “duration of outage” as spelled out in the Key Planning Scenario.
Upon completion of this step, you would have a list of business functions categorized according to criticality. With this, the Executive Management would then have a meaningful and objective basis to decide on the sequence and time-frame for recovery.
Extracted from "Chapter 8: Step 2: Verify and Analyze Information"
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