As the Union representing BT staff has announced plans to ballot its members on a possible strike over pay, do company business continuity plans include measures to cope with lengthy delays in resuming normal service in the event of a telecoms outage?
55000-60000 CWU (Communications Workers Union) members who work for BT have agreed to go to a strike ballot. Should the strike go ahead, the following areas could be affected:
1. Repair of failed ISDN 30’s will be limited or at best delayed and therefore will carry a worse repair time than normal SLA’s as Openreach employees will most likely be CWU Members.
2. The OMC (Computer) will not be used for the re-routing of calls, as generally speaking Technical Officers use the OMC and these people will most likely be CWU Members.
3. Importantly also, the Service Centre where Teamphone (BT Smart Numbers) customers ring for BT Directed Recovery will not be manned by Technical Officers. So customers of this solution may find that their telecoms recovery service won’t work in the event of a disruption.
When your telecoms continuity plan is itself placed under threat of disruption, it makes you question a wider range of resilience risks. This is just another example of how detailed planning needs to be for a telecoms outage and how thorough and robust the solution you choose must be.
