A hidden crisis behind communication

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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