The holiday season is here and between now and September many of your staff will be off for one or two weeks at a time, including your business continuity manager, IT and Telecoms managers and key senior staff.
If all were to be off at the same time and a major disruption happened to your organisation’s building, who would be in charge of the business continuity plans and would they know how to keep the business operational?
Let’s take an example of a possible scenario. The BC Manager and Telecoms manager are both off on holiday and summer flash flooding has left your offices under 3ft of water.
1. Whose responsibility is it to tell employees not to come into the office, to either work from home or go to the recovery site?
2. How are you going to ensure that your IT and telecoms systems are operating as stated in your business continuity plans?
3. Have people been informed that the BC and IT managers are off on holiday?
4. Who will be communicating to the media, suppliers and customers that you are still open for business but are operating under your business continuity plans?
5. Does every employee know what they should be doing in this scenario, and who is in charge of keeping the business functional?
6. Are your employees able to continue taking calls from customers, suppliers and collegaues during and after they have been denied access to their office building and regular desk?
If any of these questions make you nervous then I would suggest that you start addressing this issues at a micro level so that if the worst happens you know who will be pressing the button that will re-route your incoming calls to alternative phones in alternative locations.
Always have a back-up to implement your back-up plan!
