Don't blame the 'JCB' when continuity plans don't work!

WHENEVER there is a disaster, you're never far from a JCB! That's the story. They are blamed for more catastrophes than Cornish wreckers or Attila The Hun. While there is a grain of truth in the reason for the blame, the real culprit is far more mundane.

It's true that when a JCB burst a high pressure water main in Southern England, it resulted in the closure of an engineering plant which had employed several hundred people. Water had been needed not just for the manufacturing process, but to flush toilets and wash hands. Health and safety considerations required staff to go home.

The management had a water tanker delivered within a few hours, but no one had a way of getting the water into the pipes. It took almost three days before mains water was back on tap, at which time it was discovered that the sudden loss of water had seriously damaged the plant. The factory closed for good. Everyone blamed the JCB, but it was the lack of a workable business continuity plan that was the culprit.

The company had a plan of sorts. They were prepared for bird 'flu', lightning strikes, transport and power failure. Its data was backed up every day, too, but they hadn't thought about the water.

Then there was the company whose telephone lines were its life lines. I can be no more specific than to say that they are a trading company which would lose millions every hour if their phone and data lines went down. They had done what was eminently sensible: had two telecoms providers, but along came the trusty JCB and scuppered their plans. Both telecoms providers had used the same ducting. After a lot of screaming, telephony was restored four hours and forty-seven million pounds later...

They had a plan, but it didn't work!

When a high pressure gas main was hit by a JCB, it didn't burst, but it was damaged, with the fear that it might go up at any moment. Offices of more than sixty companies were evacuated for more than a day, with total losses in millions. Everybody blamed the JCB, but few blamed their business continuity plan.

Faulty plans

Business continuity management is a box that everyone wants to tick, but that's the problem. There's more concern about ticking the box than writing a plan that works.

A friend of mine asked me if I'd take a look at his company's plan. 'It won't take long,' he said. 'It's just one side of A4.' It really was. The company had a turnover in hundreds of millions and offices in five locations. The 'plan' was not a plan at all, but simply a list of phone numbers to be used in an emergency. If only this story wasn't true, but it is. At least he had a list of emergency numbers off site. That's more than the majority of companies have.

Even long and detailed plans, costing hundreds of thousands or millions to write, can be useless. The biggest single fault is planning against JCBs. I use the term JCBs to stand for any cause of business interruption. For JCB read 'flood', 'fire', 'terrorist', 'explosion', 'pandemic', 'aircraft' or any one thing that might bring your operation to a halt. Of course, it's common sense to eliminate obvious threats to your operation. No one should put a data centre on a flood plain nor a nuclear power station on a low level flight path. You don't put your server on the top floor under a water tank, but all these things are obvious. Threats should be eliminated wherever possible, but there are always threats no one has thought of. You can't plan against those.

Those who made a plan for the HQ of a certain emergency service didn't plan against a rat gnawing through a cable and disrupting command and control. The offices of a financial institution in London didn't even know that it was built above a disused Post Office tunnel, stuffed with asbestos. Junk in the tunnel caught fire and smoke seeped into the bank. The building was closed for weeks. The lesson is - don't plan against the JCB. They are lovely machines and do a lot of good.

Getting it right

The trick of getting it right is to make plans against the loss of functions not against the cause of the loss of functions. If your operation needs its call centre 24x7, there's no need to plan against the JCB cutting the cables, or a fire in the building, or a power failure or... or..! Sure, eliminate obvious threats, but have contingency plans against the loss of operation of the call-centre, irrespective of the cause.

Making a good job of your business continuity plan involves first doing what is known as a 'business impact assessment' (BIA) - weighing up the impact of loss of all your organisation's various functions. You'll also need to establish the 'maximum tolerable period of disruption (MTPD) for those functions, and then a 'recovery time objective' (RTO). Only then can you begin to plan.

None of this is as arcane as it sounds and bears study. If it's all new to you and you want to get cracking, get some training first.

I must sign off now. There's a traffic warden down the street and my JCB's on a double yellow line.

Continuity Shop will be at Business Continuity Expo and Conference held at EXCEL Docklands between 28 & 29th March 2007. This event will explore the solutions and best practice to ensure operational continuity and protect a company's interests before during and after an incident. See website - link above/right - for further information.