How can you plan for something that is unpredictable? Read on for some general tips

Business Continuity Planning is the process of preparing your business so it can continue serving its customers and generating profits when something has gone wrong. There are any number of events that can cause an incident that has the potential to disrupt your business, but you can’t prepare for every event.

So, how do you prepare for the unpredictable? The answer is to ensure you have a robust incident management approach that can cope with the unexpected.

Here are some tips on how to prepare for the unpredictable.

Communicate with customers

Some incidents stop your business, no matter what you try and do ahead of time. If you are a railway operator and a crash closes the line, you have no way to transport your customers until the line is cleared or a diversionary route becomes available. Concentrate on communicating with your customers and keeping them abreast of developments. It won’t reduce their pain significantly but it will reduce frustration.

Being a sometime regular traveller on the UK rail system I know the difference that good communication to travellers can make when something big has happened to shut the railway. I was on the wrong side (i.e. distance from home) of both the Hatfield and Potters Bar rail crashes. In both cases I was stranded at Kings Cross but communication was better in the latter case. Using this information allowed me to take a strategic decision to abandon Kings Cross and get home via another route.

Avoid creeping crises

Many incidents creep up on you rather than just happen. It can be very tempting to delay the invocation of your Business Continuity Plan in case the incident dies away. Pandemic flu might fall into this category. The loss of a couple of staff, due either to illness or demands to care for others, might seem manageable. The loss of a couple more could probably be absorbed. At what point do you invoke your Plan? The prudent action is to invoke the plan early on. It is far better to have invoked the plan and then cancelled rather than finding yourself one week into a crisis and wishing you had invoked the plan one week earlier.

Even in the case where the plan is cancelled, there will have been a raising of awareness of the plan’s existence and some opportunities to practise in a live environment.

Avoid indecision

It can be very easy for managers to fall into an indecision trap: where they fail to take decisive action because they’re not sure of the Company’s position on how to handle the incident. Avoid this by having in place a process whereby Senior Management can communicate effectively and efficiently with all levels. Use this process to give robust advice on where the Company stands. For example: if staff are idle, should they be sent home? Will they be paid? Issuing guidance early on promotes consistency of response.

Monitor your supply chain

Most businesses exist in some form of supply chain. Make sure you understand who your critical suppliers are and what events could affect their ability to serve you. Establish processes for monitoring the conditions that could cause such events to occur. In the topical case of a manufacturer that depends on hard disk drives from Thailand, knowing that flooding could affect the supplier would have given advance warning that a problem was looming.

Keep people working

Consider strategies for keeping people working: e.g. from home. Rather than simply laying people off, consider if core groups can work effectively from home if they are supplied with suitable technology and given the appropriate training. If this is the case, then prepare plans and practise them.

Understand your dependencies

Many business processes are dependent on other processes inside the business and with outside agencies. The success of your Business Continuity strategies may depend on the quality of your relationships with these other groups.

Make sure you understand your dependencies and know what impact they can have on you. Spend time building good relationships with people on whom you are dependent. Build personal contacts within those organisations so that they give you a better understanding of what’s going. That way you won’t have to rely on publicly available information and press releases.

No man is an island

It is tempting to believe that other people’s incidents don’t affect you. This is often not the case however. If you were a business travel agency during the Ash Crisis of 2010, you’ll know only too well how much extra effort was required to adjust disrupted travel plans.

Summary

Hopefully, these tips will have planted some ideas that you can use in your own business. Remember that the focus of Business Continuity Planning is on keeping the business operating even though events are conspiring against it doing so. Effective Incident Response Planning can make the difference between a business that continues with a minor hiccup and one that suffers major disruption and financial loss.