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 Michael
Faber raises various communications issues which some business continuity
plans fail to address.
When planning for business recovery from major
incidents - possibly caused by a building power failure, or fire,
or bomb incident - an alternate place of work will need to be planned
for.
If the incident affects your primary place
of work, this may be a dedicated facility; particularly in large
organisations or it may be a shared facility such as those provided
by disaster recovery companies.
While the percentage of seats / places provided
for at recovery sites would vary depending on the nature of the
business, an approximation of 20 percent to 25 percent of the total
workforce is a reasonable number as a rule of thumb.
While the numbers may sound good in theory,
the practicalities of recovering the business in a timely manner
and continuing the business with a significantly reduced headcount
needs to be well thought through.
This article focuses on two of the key forms
of communication that will be expected to continue as ‘business
as usual’, namely voice and e-mail.
Voice
Clearly if planning to reduce the active workforce in the aftermath
of a disaster, the business continuity strategy would plan for a
reduction in the daily workload. For example, the affected business
will probably limit or halt new business activities. However in
contrast to the general expectations in the business continuity
plan for reducing daily work, incoming voice traffic can increase
significantly during a crisis.
As a minimum within your recovery planning
process, you will need to have formal plans to transfer your main
telephone numbers and Direct Dialling Inward (DDI) numbers to the
recovery site. However, there may be a time between the incident
first occurring and the time when telephonists and the staff arrive
at the recovery site when calls are not being answered. Adding an
additional step in the transfer process to a help desk, or transferring
to a pre-prepared message prior to the full transfer to the recovery
site could cover this time period, until switchboard operators and
the rest of the staff arrive.
Another issue can be relating to the transfer
of DDI numbers when (if using a basic transfer method with the carriers)
you will find that the individual DDI numbers have ‘collapsed’ into one number at the recovery site, unless the recovery site is
in the same serving exchange. This will result in a bottleneck for
the switchboard operators as they will have all of the calls that
would have been directed to individual DDI numbers as well as calls
to the main published number to answer. This needs to be covered
by either an advanced technical solution or, as a minimum, ensuring
that staff on arrival call their key contacts and inform them of
their new DDI number, thus reducing the calls directed through the
switchboard operators. Departmental group pick-ups will also help
to distribute calls to the relevant area.
It is also important to understand which are
the key business phone numbers that must be redirected to the recovery
site and how they will or can be presented there. If there is a
dedicated number for a key process that requires priority handling
then it will require its own answer point.
Overall, voice communication is arguably the
most important part of the recovery process for many businesses
and therefore an appropriate level of attention needs to be given
to the handling of voice recovery.
E-mail
A second key form of communication is that of e-mail, which is rapidly
becoming the key business application. As with voice, incoming e-mail
will not decrease when a crisis occurs.
So, assuming that the company has a resilient
service, e-mails can continue to operate inbound and outbound from
the recovery site.
Now going back to the original view of approximately
20 percent workforce recovery at the recovery site, all emails will
be arriving for 100 percent of the workforce. Given the year on
year increase in e-mail volumes and the minimum workforce located
at the recovery site, how will you manage the company’s e-mails?
Capacity, storage and loss issues need to be assessed and understood
by all parties.
Some of the staff may be working from home
and be able to dial in to the corporate e-mail system, but the vast
majority may not. If you have a number of users who have the ability
to dial in remotely you will need to confirm that the dial in facility
has the necessary capacity to accommodate the increased requirements.
A management strategy for handling e-mails
and inboxes will need to be put in place and where possible procedures
set-up in advance to cover the requirement for more centralised
handling of inboxes within business areas. When setting up these
plans, be mindful of any data protection, personal privacy, or IT
security issues that may need to be considered.
Some other forms of communication that will
need to be considered include ‘in person’ – meetings
etc, fax correspondence and post, each of which is covered briefly
below.
In person
Apart from internal meetings and discussions, there will generally
be meetings planned with external parties. Some of the meetings
may need to be cancelled. Do you have centralised meeting registers
and how will all parties be informed?
Good practice suggests that your recovery site
should be at least 5km away, but you may however still wish to hold
external meetings as near as possible to your main office. A suitable
location will therefore need to be established and communicated
to your guests.
Fax
The requirement for fax has reduced over the years, but is still
used in some businesses and in specific business areas. It is important
to identify all published numbers and ensure that they can be accommodated
at the recovery site.
When carrying out the business impact analysis
it is an opportunity to identify key fax numbers, especially those
that are provided via DDI. If at all possible all fax numbers should
be in a dedicated DDI range in order that the range can be switched
to an alternate fax answer point. If your fax DDI numbers are spread
throughout the DDI range it will be impractical to extract them.
This will undoubtedly cause the switchboard operators problems,
due to Fax tones being received when they answer the call. There
will also be a short-term problem with auto redialling of calls
that fail, or are failed by the operators dumping the fax calls.
Post
As a standard within business continuity plans, there will normally
be a step involving the re-direction of post to the recovery site
address. However, it is not always catered for in terms of a mailroom
at the recovery site. It is worth ensuring that incoming mail can
be sorted and distributed and that external bound mail can be processed
and posted, as required.
In conclusion
The theory behind recovering key and essential business processes
and personnel to a recovery site is a good one, but needs to be
well planed in terms of how communications will be handled and managed
with a significantly reduced head count, running from a different
location.
Contact Michael Faber at michael.faber@regaltraining.com
•Date:
2nd July 2004 •Region: UK/World •Type:
Article •Topic: BC
general
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