You Can't Afford NOT to Have a Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Plan… 10 Things to Include

Business Continuity planning is key to protecting your investment in your business. 

During and after a disaster, a written plan is required so you can continue to provide services to the customers who depend on you, provide paychecks to the employees (and their families) that depend on you, and it may be the last act of kindness you will ever do for your survivors.

When you are faced with a crisis, you can’t think, you can’t remember basic things, and you can’t make smart decisions. There are a few professions where this is not the case – law enforcement, the military, ER nurses and doctors have training and experience in keeping calm in the midst of a crisis -- but as owners of IT businesses you just need to accept the fact and overcome any obstacles to starting your plan. If you are new to HTG and still have doubts, ask your fellow peer group members to introduce you to others who have experienced a disaster. They won’t have to look far.

It took a while for Arlin Sorensen, HTG’s CEO and Founder, to get it (but he always tells everyone he is a slow learner). Lloyd Wolf is an HTG member who also saw the benefit of preparing for a crisis. 

Arlin had to deal with his emotions, fear, and confusion when the killer tornado came within 14 blocks of his Joplin office and destroyed HTG member John Motazedi’s business. Lloyd Wolf was reminded of the importance of a written BC/DR plan when he was called about a family medical emergency, and he couldn’t remember his ambulance service’s phone number. Lloyd grabbed his HTG Business Continuity Plan and immediately found the number because he had written it down when his head was clear.

Planning should cover the big disasters and also include smaller disruptions- anything that can interrupt your business. It can start out very simple by just gathering the contact information you will need in a disaster. Not just the usual contact info, because you have to add the information for employees’ spouses, family members, and out-of-state contacts, in case you can’t reach your employee directly. You will need the after-hours contact information for key vendors, including your insurance company and utilities.

You can easily find that in the office, you say? What about at 3AM on a Saturday when you get a call that your office is on fire? Or when a fellow HTG peer group member suddenly passes away, and his wife calls you to help her run the business for the next few weeks? What if the disaster happens when you are at an HTG conference? What if the disaster affects you, which means that your employees will have to implement your plan?

Here are 10 reasons why business continuity plans fail and how to prevent them...

1.         KEEPING YOUR PLAN IN YOUR HEAD

Having a plan in your head is not having a plan. Some of the smartest people I know have told me when disaster struck they couldn’t remember names of close friends and even family members, phone numbers, and where they hide valuables. They said that having a written plan saved them.

2.        FILLING IN FORMS WITHOUT THINKING

There are many business continuity checklists and plan templates available from the government, the Red Cross, and other organizations. Some folks just fill them out and check boxes to comply with a requirement to have a plan, without thinking through what will happen in a disaster.

3.        UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS

Many plans are created expecting that power, cell phones, phone lines, Internet, and water will all be working; and roads will be open.  Plans are written expecting that everyone will show up for work, staff won’t have damage at home, won’t have to take care of families and pets, and won’t be stressed. Or injured or dead. Some plans include alternate sites that have never been cleared in advance.

4.        FOCUSING ON THE WRONG THINGS

Question: What is your business continuity plan?
Answer: We backup our servers every night and can recover them in the Cloud.

That is a partial plan. A complete plan will also focus on your personnel (their safety first!) and on your facilities.  How will you communicate with your staff during/after a disaster? What if your mail server is down? Who needs to respond? Where should they go?

5.        LITTLE OR NO TESTING

Plans are often written and placed on a shelf or distributed to managers with little or no testing. An untested plan is not a plan, but a collection of words. Testing should start out with an exercise around a conference table and eventually to a full offsite simulation.

6.        NO DISASTER EXPERIENCE

Plans written by people without disaster experience can be doomed from the start. If you make the wrong assumptions, you will come to the wrong conclusions. Hire a consultant or attend a workshop led by a disaster professional.

7.        TOO DETAILED

Plans are not owner’s manuals for your business, but guidance to your managers and staff on what tasks are to be completed, and in which order. 

8.       NOT DETAILED ENOUGH

Plans should contain critical contacts, phone numbers, account numbers, insurance policy numbers, banking and credit info, logins and passwords, etc. Don’t expect that you will remember or be able to access the information during a disaster.

9.        NOT UPDATED

Business needs change. Technology changes. Staff changes. Passwords change. Your plan needs to be current when you reach for it. 

10.     NOT SHARED

A plan sitting in an office is of no use if the office burns down or you can’t leave your house. A plan is no good if it is only provided to a few top managers or family members and not to those who need to respond. You don’t have to share everything with everyone, but think through who needs to know what.