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Give me POWER: How to keep working when the lights go out
Business continuity is not a dirty word. It's two words. But they're not dirty ones
Infectious staff and other problems
It's also worth mentioning that having your users work at home during a crisis is a particularly useful concept if the users themselves are part of the problem. I've seen a surprising number of businesses (particularly small- and low-end-medium ones) knocked sideways by an outbreak of one or other of the sickness-and-diarrhoea bugs that do the rounds from time to time. If you suddenly find that 20 per cent of your people are out of action because they're terrified of being more than ten feet from the bog, it's not a bad idea to send some of the others home to work before they're struck down and unable to perform.
Home working does have its downsides, of course – namely that everyone's spread over the space of several square miles and productivity is usually impacted as a result of the reduced intra-company communication. In a business-continuity context it does keep you going, though, which is what we care about.
Interacting with others
The other thing you need to consider is how you interact with your customers and suppliers. For telecoms you need to ensure you have a means of diverting calls to staff members' mobile devices, but that's not generally a hard thing to do. What's often forgotten in a business-continuity scenario, though, is that if you can't get to the office then neither can your customers or suppliers – so if you're a very face-to-face business you'll need to think about how you can substitute electronic systems for that personal contact. This could be desktop video-conferencing and electronic white-boarding, but similarly it might just be that you talk to your key clients and rearrange your interactions so that while you're having your premises crisis you concentrate on the bits of the contract that require less personal interaction.
Accepting the outage
There is one more thing you can do in a crisis, by the way: accept it and tell everyone to go to the pub. Actually I don't really mean everyone – you'll need a small skeleton crew to deal with managing and monitoring the crisis, handling key communications with staff, suppliers, customers and perhaps the emergency services. But in fact in the early days of a crisis it can be better to have a dozen or so core people remain while everyone else goes home than to have everyone waiting to be told what to do. By all means send people home, so long as you're sure you can contact them once you have something to tell them, so you can focus on the matter in hand.
The next step: A business continuity plan
What I've given you in this feature is little more than a few ideas that you can take away to your colleagues: the thing to do is brew a big pot of fresh coffee, break out the flipchart and sit for a couple of hours asking questions starting with: “What if?”
If you find yourself starting to fret then you need to appoint someone to own your business continuity strategy and spend some time and money creating and managing one properly.
Business continuity is an industry in itself – as well as being part of internally focused business continuity teams, I've also taken part in full-blown exercises where we've spent entire days sitting in our business continuity premises working through imaginary scenarios with real people and real systems.
There's plenty to consider, then, if you want to protect your business against adversity. ®