Struggling with your business continuity management, try this approach instead

Key takeaways 1. Adopt a Top-Down Approach: Instead of a bottom-up operational approach, adopt a top-down strategic approach to business continuity. Identify and manage enterprise-wide critical business functions and resources, gaining executive consensus on their risk appetite and tolerances for maximum acceptable outages of critical business functions and resources. 2. Prioritise Simplicity and Focus on Practicality: Many executives struggle with complex and over-engineered business continuity plans. Keep it easy to understand and implement, avoiding unnecessary complexity. Business continuity plans can be short, practical and relevant to the people who will use them. 3. Testability Matters: Overly complicated and long plans are challenging to test, integrate, improve, and maintain. Simplified plans are more testable and adaptable to changing circumstances. 4. Strengthen Critical Resources: Focus on strengthening the resilience of critical resources. Develop clear resilience strategies for these resources, which are time-sensitive and mission-critical. 5. Effective Implementation: A simpler approach enables better communication and understanding, which is essential for effective implementation.

Unprepared for future shocks?

Struggling with business continuity?

No skills for effective business continuity?

No enterprise-wide business continuity plan?

Can’t test complicated business continuity plans?

Budgetary and time constraints for business continuity?

Do you need a cost-effective enterprise-wide business continuity plan that is super easy to understand, develop, implement, and test?

Do these questions resonate with you?

“Simplify our business continuity. We have been struggling with it for years. Don’t over-engineer it.”

That was my manager’s response when I got hired by a large organisation with several overseas operations. My mandate was to keep the organisation’s business continuity simple, easy to understand and implement, and not take up a lot of employees’ effort and time.

Coincidently, at that same time, I was talking to a friend who is the head of risk for a large power company in Asia. He too was having the same problem with a Big 4 consulting firm that his organisation had hired to develop their business continuity plan.

“Over-engineered, the consultants missed the mark (of the engagement brief to develop a practical BC approach), and it is costing us too much,” he lamented. (“Missed the mark” were the keywords for me!)

His plea and the plea of many other executives and managers to simplify business continuity and to make it relevant and practical to the people who will use it have been around for decades. But no one is listening or doing anything about it.

In my previous engagements, a group of hospital executives expressed similar problems with their business continuity approach – “It’s too operational, too time-consuming, and too resource-intensive for a resourced-limited hospital like ours!”.

“I want everything on one page!” (And it is possible!)

Working with several metro hospitals in Melbourne, I developed a simplified but strategic business continuity solution for hospitals that met their key requirement – “I want everything on one page!”. That is, to create a hospital-wide business continuity plan on a page!)

They go on to say, “We don’t have time nor resources for developing pages and pages of useless business continuity plans that no one will ever read or use during a major disruption!”

This simplified but practical business continuity approach for hospitals was later improved through scenario-testing workshops and implemented across small, medium, and large hospitals in the state of Victoria. You cannot get more complicated than developing an actionable enterprise-wide business continuity plan (on one page) for hospitals!

When you are on the operating table and the lights go out, the team has 15 to 20 minutes to stitch you back up and get you out of the operating theatre.

This same fundamental approach to practical business continuity has been incorporated into what I do today – an integrated top-down business continuity approach that is simplified, strategic, and actionable.

Hard to test over-engineered business continuity plans

Overcomplicated or over-engineered business continuity plans make it very difficult to test, integrate, improve, and maintain.

When cost-cutting is at the top of the executive agenda, organisations must innovate and find new ways to develop business continuity plans to fulfil their compliance and good governance obligations.

This is where practical business continuity comes in.

You need a top-down strategic approach

As a risk professional who loves business continuity and making things practical, organisations need a top-down approach that focuses on identifying and managing enterprise-wide time-sensitive critical business functions and resources. This avoids a siloed-based, bottom-up operational, approach that is commonly used and accepted as best.

Having over-engineered plans, especially from a compliance perspective is one thing. However, having simplified plans that work intuitively and practically in an integrated manner during a crisis is another.

This is a root cause of frustrated executives – overcomplicated, resource intensive and non-implementable business continuity plans.

And because these plans are developed in isolation and are untested, many people hired to get these plans in place get away with it (and charge you a fortune for a useless product too.)

Here’s what you can do to change it

At a high level, the steps are:

1. Identify your time-sensitive critical business functions.
   • Identify and classify external-facing, time-sensitive, mission-critical business functions.
   • Gain executive consensus on enterprise-wide critical functions.
2. Strengthen the resilience of your critical resources.
   • Identify enterprise-wide critical resources that are time-sensitive.
   • Develop resilience strategies for these critical resources.
3. Co-develop your business continuity strategies.
   • Co-develop practical, intuitive, cost-effective, complete, and clear business continuity strategies for your critical business functions.
   • Identify alternative workarounds and manual processes.
4. Document, test, and improve your ‘lite’ enterprise-wide business continuity plan.
   • Document resilience strategies for critical resources and business continuity strategies for critical functions.
   • Train employees to implement these strategies and your simplified enterprise-wide business continuity plan.
   • Continuously test and enhance your resilience and business continuity strategies, as well as your ‘lite’ business continuity plan.

It is time to simplify your business continuity in a cost-effective way

Don’t let an over-engineered approach prohibit you from developing and implementing a practical and sustainable business continuity approach that is easy to understand and implement.

When an organisation is complex, your business continuity approach must be simple. This is an inverse relationship.

Simplicity will enable you to explain your approach to others. Over-complication does not bring people along the journey. Rather, it only confuses them or even turns them off from managing the organisation’s disruption-related risks. Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. It’s now the time to take a fresh but different simplified, strategic, and sustainable approach to business continuity.