GuruMantras™ of Contingency Planning
GuruMantras ™ ofContingency Planning
(He who fails to prepare,prepares to fail)
All businesses and organizations are prone to serious incidents that can prevent it from continuing normal operations. This can range from a flood, fire, natural calamity to a serious computer malfunction or Information Security breakdown.
The management of the organization has a responsibility to recover from such incidents in the minimum amount of time, with minimum disruption and at minimum cost. This requires careful preparation and planning and thus brings in the law of contingency planning some times also known as"Back-up plans", "Worst-case scenario plans" or "PlanB".
The guru mantra here is that it is important for an organization to take the development and maintenance of the disaster recovery plan seriously. It is not one of those tasks that can be left until everyone has time to deal with it. A serious incident can affect the organization at any time including the very next minute.
A contingency plan is developed by a team representing people from all functional areas or departments of an organization. If the organization is large enough, a formal project needs to be carried out.
The first step in contingency planning is to prepare a comprehensive list of the potentially serious incidents that could affect the normal operations of the business. This list should include all possible incidents no matter how remote the likelihood of their occurrence. Against each item listed the manager should examine the probability.Each incident should also be rated for potential impact severity level. From this information, it will become much easier to frame the plan in the context of the real needs of the organization.
Once the initial assessment stage has been completed, the structure of the plan can be established. The plan will contain a range of milestones to move the organization from its disrupted status to reinforcing it to its normal operations.
The first important milestone is the process which deals with the immediate aftermath of the disaster. This may involve the emergency services or other specialists who are trained to deal with extreme situations. The next stage is to determine which critical business functions need to be resumed and in what order. It will also highlight and identify key individuals who should be familiar with their duties under the plan.
Once this plan has been developed it must be subjected to rigorous testing. The testing process itself must be properly planned and should be carried out in a suitable environment to reproduce authentic conditions to check its feasibility. The test procedures should be documented and the results recorded. This is important to ensure that feedback is obtained for fine tuning the Plan.
The plan must always be kept upto date and applicable to current business circumstances. This means that any changes to the business process or changes to the relative importance of each part of the business process must be properly reflected within the plan.
Organizations must set up a separate department and someone must be assigned responsibility for ensuring that the plan is maintained and updated regularly and should therefore ensure that information concerning changes to the business process is properly communicated. Any changes or amendments made to the plan must be fully tested and proper communication should be made to all the people involved with it.
The above columnist was recognized with the Best Entrepreneur Award (youth category) by DSI. He is also acknowledged as the Best Manager, Bangalore University; Best CEO, Manipal University and the youngest entrepreneur to be nominated for the Hottest Startups Award by TATA & NEN.
