Business Continuity Planning… How could it help right now? It’s not too late.

As many of you in the New Orleans area and surrounding parishes are aware, life can change and has changed very rapidly for us as Ida ripped through and electric power lines fell into the Mississippi. There’s something about this city and its geographic receptivity to extraordinary weather events, but also its propensity to recover. Crescent Payroll Solutions and CrescentHR continues to help our clients through complex human capital management issues including, how to keep your business running while everything around you goes haywire.

My partner owns a General Contracting business and is always preparing for things like Ida, Laura, Michael, Harvey, Katrina, et al. He and his 35 plus employees are given specific duties after catastrophic events and each is deployed according to a simple, linear disaster response plan, that developed as a result of their disaster recovery experience. Their goal is to get into a disaster area within a day, tarp hundreds of roofs and begin redoing roofs within 3-5 days after a storm. From there, they want to systematically overhaul and put back together interiors / exteriors of homes and businesses within 6-9 months after a disaster.

There is a lot involved for sure, and whether you've planned for this or not, there are certain things you should always consider. Everything from ensuring employee safety (without the employees, there is no business) to coordinating specialized subcontractors and vendors is vital. And to make things even more challenging, technicians can be scarce or overwhelmed in post-disaster situations, rendering resource allocation more of a work of art than a replicable system.

I tried to break down their Business Continuity Plan or BCP sequence into something transferable across industries. It might first help to define what BCP is. Business continuity outlines exactly how a business will proceed during and following a disaster. It may provide contingency plans, outlining how the business will continue to operate even if it has to move to an alternate location. Business continuity planning may also take into account smaller interruptions or minor disasters, such as extended power outages.

1. Think about your business vision and, in the context of your business vision, write down what you need to accomplish in the event of a disaster. Do you have a strategy, like my partner, that capitalizes on catastrophe, by providing crucial recovery services? This is called your scope – write a scope, a scope of what your business continuity plan should achieve. BCP scope should include a statement of purpose and include an overview of what departments and who is impacted and who should be activated in such scenarios.
2. Next think about activating your plan and notification of participants. Usually, this has to happen prior to a disaster, you should know where people are going and how they plan to deploy or to get to the affected area:
   1. Assess magnitude of situation (who does that? Who is first into the disaster area to assess scale of problems.
   2. What is your chain of command? Who are managers and their direct reports – map it out?
   3. How will you communicate?
3. How do you notify all of your employees? Usually, this can be systematic at a high level, then managers should follow up with direct reports to confirm connectivity and availability.
4. Anticipate the unexpected, make assumptions and create guidelines accordingly:
   1. Systems down
   2. Network connectivity disrupted
   3. Building down
   4. Employee safety
   5. Key vendors availability
5. Think compensation, rewards, and incentives and also think about those employees who are not involved in the BCP, and find some way to include, or plan for separating temporarily as business flow is disrupted.

Remember, that having a Business Continuity Plan is ideally predicated on careful planning and anticipating the various kinds of disaster situations a business might face. If not, you'll be reactive, which is ok. My partner’s business includes a division dedicated to disaster recovery in the Gulf South, it’s always mobile, and they are always documenting and measuring things like insurance process relative to the types of catastrophe that occurs, turnaround time for tarping complex roofs, etc. Since his business strategy includes a disaster recovery division and cohesion interdepartmentally, he brought his entire team on a retreat, where, for 2 full days, everyone was tasked with documenting process and planning for how the business would stay continually operational, logistics such as connectivity and systems, and chain of command and decision making. It was a grueling but carefully managed process.

COVID is a perfect example of a curve-ball disaster. Most businesses didn’t see that coming. So, think about the things that could happen, and expect the unexpected to transpire. And ensure your plan has the right level of contingency options for the various and inevitable twists and turns. Here’s a brief planning outline:

6. Bring together your business leaders, develop the plan one scenario at a time. Start by capturing the business’ or department’s internal work process. Examine how departments conduct operations and how you respond and recover from problems impacting your normal operations.
7. Analyze where and how the scenario would impact business or departmental operations.
8. Brainstorm on how the problem will be dealt with. Then refine a general strategy or approach to overcome the crisis (a.k.a. response) and resume operations (a.k.a. recovery)
9. Write out the general strategy and add detail to make it a plan.
10. Insert the crucial actions or tasks by job title or discipline associated with successful execution of the plan.
    1. Be sure to consider what resources and logistics will be required to accomplish these tasks or actions. (INTERNET CONNECTIVITY, housing, etc.)
    2. Prepare these resources now or have a plan to acquire them if a crisis occurs. For example, if you plan on using paper forms as a backup to computers, have enough pre-printed copies stored and available to sustain operations while more are being printed/xeroxed. (HOTSPOTS, Hotel contracts, etc.)
    3. Consider the logistics of everything you do. For example, if you plan on moving from one campus to another consider transportation issues, seating arrangements and workstation availability at the alternate location, and the availability of infrastructure (e.g., phones, phone lines, LAN connections, outlets, computers, software, etc.
    4. Coordinate, Coordinate, Coordinate! Your plan has an impact on not just customers/patients but also on other departments. Communicate and coordinate with others to ensure your plan does not prevent another department from accomplishing its mission.
    5. Ensure the plan is not reliant on the availability of one or two key leaders or key individuals. You must make plans if they are not available during the crisis.
11. Assign responsibility and a timeframe for each task in the plan to support rapid resumption of department operations. In a crisis there should be no ambiguity about who in your department is responsible for executing or supervising critical tasks.
12. Consider, and then add any key decisions that must be made in such a crisis. Who should make the decision? Based on what criteria? Facilitate rapid and effective decision making during a crisis by foreseeing the types of decisions that will have to be made in each scenario.
13. Consider that normal department leadership may not be available for plan execution and the plan should be concise enough so that any mix of department staff can implement it. However, develop a plan to get more help (especially during off shifts).