Ten Steps for Practical Business Continuity Planning
“A practical methodology for managing your business continuity by applying program management techniques”
By Timothy S. Bergmann, PMP, ABCP
Chief Learning Officer
True Solutions Inc.
Business Continuity Planning is a complicated, sometimes difficult endeavor for an organization. One of the challenges that colors the process is that Business Continuity Planning is still in the formative stages. BC experts who are working today are often the same individuals who performed Disaster Recovery planning on early mainframes and self published their findings. While there is always a definite need for Business Continuity Planning, there are many barriers to success. This paper describes a methodology at a high level that can facilitate success for Business Continuity Planning by applying proven project management, program management and business continuity best practices in a coordinated manner.
Business Continuity Planning superseded the concept of Disaster Recovery around 1994-1995 after the Hurricane Andrew experience in Florida. During this widespread disaster event, some companies found that they had protected their infrastructure (Disaster Recovery), but had failed to protect the company (Business Continuity). This initiated an evolution from Disaster Recovery thinking to Business Continuity thinking.
Simply stated, Business Continuity deals with all of the elements of the company:
- Infrastructure (Buildings, communications and computing)
- Sales
- Fulfillment and customer service
- Human Resources
- Security
- Risk scenarios
To oversimplify, Business Continuity deals with the organization holistically; in the past Disaster Recovery only dealt with a small portion of the organization.
But there are some definite challenges to Business Continuity. First of all, in order to address a problem, the organization has to recognize that a problem or need exists. Many organizations fail to plan for Business Continuity due to various reasons, such as lack of resources, lack of budget and lack of interest. Many organizations suffer from the vision that “It won’t happen here” and fail to take adequate precautions to protect the enterprise.
Think about it: how often have the officers and directors of a company that failed into bankruptcy been criminally or civilly prosecuted for the failure? Sometimes, usually in cases of fraudulent activity there have been prosecutions; Enron, Tyco and Worldcom would be recent examples of criminal prosecutions. But while these prosecutions have been very public events, there are very few corporate leaders who suffer this fate.
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