This may seem like an obvious question, because the answers are probably: making sales, delivery products/services and getting paid. In fact, a closer analysis of the answers will probably identify specific elements of those major business processes that are more important than others.

The first phase of introducing business continuity into an organisation is to understand what activities are of critical importance to the business and what could go wrong to disrupt those activities.

Try this

1. Taking a close look at each of your major business processes, break each down into into a series of dependent activities and assess each activity separately.
2. Work out, or estimate, the impact on the business’s long term survival if the activity was disrupted for any reason. Think in terms of revenue, customer relations, brand damage and regulatory breach. Assess for different periods of disruption.
3. Rank the activities by the highest impact on the business in the shortest time.

The activities at the top of the list are the critical ones in your business.

Monday Tips

This tip is one of a series on how to improve the resilience of your business so it can survive and grow. Subscribe to the blog to receive more tips as and when they are published.

I suspect most people would probably lose their head for a short while, but what about after that?

If you can say with conviction that you have done your homework, you have taken measures to reduce the impact and you have plans in place to speed your recovery whilst being able to continue working; then you have a Business Continuity Plan.

If you can’t say that with conviction, talk to me or take a look at “10 simple steps to creating your own business continuity plan“

If you are a very small business with a simple structure, then the process of producing your own business continuity plan couldn’t be simpler. In fact, I’ve taken the need to conduct a lot of research into how to do it away from you and put the results into a simple 10 step process.

By following this simple 10 step process, you will gain:

• insight into which parts of your business are really important and how soon they would need to be operational again after an incident;
• tips on how to assess and mitigate risks;
• ideas for what to look out for; and
• guidance on how to structure your plans.

You will also find out why it is important to exercise your plans and keep them up to date.

As I said, this e-series is free, all I ask is that you subscribe to receive it. Go to this page to find out more about the e-series and subscribe to receive it.

I hope you find the e-series useful. Please let me know if it is (or isn’t) useful. You can comment against this blog entry, email me at gareth@agdon.co.uk or call me on 01480 476 297.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Of course if, after reading the e-series, you feel you need more advice or assistance, I can also help you. Feel free to contact me using the methods above or via the Contact page.

(After some initial feedback, I have split the proposed e-doc into a series of bite-sized chunks, each dealing with a single step. In the final step, you will still get the entire e-doc)

I am writing this on my laptop and connected to my website via my 3G modem. I mention this because currently my office has no communications, voice or data, because BT has disconnected the lines to fix a fault that has been present on one of them for the past few weeks. I had 5 minutes that this was going to happen!

As you can see, the absence of comms has made no difference to my ability to serve my customers or get on with my work. My inbound voice calls automatically re-direct to the excellent people at Kendlebel in Luton, I have my mobile for making outbound calls and I can access the internet with my 3G modem. So, no interruption in service.

How about you?

Does your business continue uninterrupted when something unexpected happens? What do you do in a similar circumstance. Do let me know.

How I can help you

If you think you wouldn’t fare so well, perhaps you need some advice. Perhaps you need some help putting together a plan of action and the necessary preparations. If so, call me today and I’ll see what I can do. I might not answer the phone, but Kendlebel will alert me immediately and I’ll call you right back.

I can’t give you a single number, but I can help you work one out for yourself.

Let’s explore one area of resilience and take the example of IT spend on backups. Try this thought experiment:

Consider the following scenario. You are a small business of 5 employees with 2 computers connected to a LAN in a single office. Not an untypical scenario for a small manufacturing business. The computers are used for sales and marketing, accounts, stock control, email and general wordprocessing of quotations, proposals and invoices.

How much is it worth investing to protect those computers and the business information stored on them?

Protecting the latest versions of data is pretty simple: just copy the data files to a removable storage device such as a memory stick or USB hard drive. That will give you basic protection of the current data. But what would happen if the computer’s hard disk crashed, or a virus corrupted the operating system?

Getting back to a steady state might require:

• Sourcing and installing a new hard disk – say 1-2 days.
• Re-installing Windows and updating to the latest patch state – 1 day.
• Re-installing the applications and updating to the latest patches – another 1 day.
• Configuring the computer to be the way it was when you were using it – say another half a day.
• Restoring the data – 30 minutes.

That’s a period of between 4 and 7 working days, during which you have no access to the applications that were running on that computer. Oh, and you have been busy recovering the computer rather than doing your day job. How would this impact your business?

• What figure do you have on your balance sheet for Goodwill? How much of that could be jeopardised by not being able to deal with clients for 7 days?
• How much business do you usually close in those 7 days? How much would be lost because it went elsewhere?

The answers will differ for all businesses, but I bet it is more than the investment required to put in place an automatic backup system that would allow you to reduce that 4 to 7 day delay to just the 1-2 days it takes to get a new disk because the restoration takes just a few hours.

Food for thought?

What to do next

My job is to help businesses identify the critical activities in their company; calculate the impact (financial and operational) on the business if one or more of the critical activities were disrupted; putting in place measures to reduce the risks and resulting impact; planning what to do if something goes wrong; and then exercising those plans.

To find out how I can help you make your business more resilient, call me now on 01480 476 297 or use any the contact methods on the Contact page.

Such exercising can take the form of table top exercises, walkthroughs or simulated emergencies. An example of the latter is the fire drill that all organisations undertake occasionally. The purpose is to familiarise people with the plan and see what needs to be changed when it is executed.

Do you exercise your plan?

If you don’t, I’d be very interested in knowing why not.

The advantage of digitising all our information: photos, music, book, documents; is that it can all sit in a single small volume of space, the hard drive on your computer, and be completely portable. Unfortunately, loss or corruption of that hard drive can have dire consequences if appropriate measures have not been taken.

The article goes on to report on how people who have lost their digital possessions have threatened suicide if the data cannot be recovered!

The answer is simple and cost effective: online backup. If you want to have all your data held electronically, take advantage of the many data replication services to ensure it exists in multiple places. That way, losing one device is not the end of the world.

What I Do

I have been using Dropbox to hold a lot of my critical data and sync it across multiple devices for some time now. It’s free if the volume is low and still price competitive for larger volumes.

For music and photo backup I use a vendor provided cloud service that backs up the Windows Home Server on which all this data is stored.

What do you do?

What measures have you taken to preserve your digital data, or would you prefer suicide?

Perception

The survey showed that 77% of small or medium sized companies in the UK are somewhat or very satisfied with their planning for how they would react if they experienced a disaster and 81% believe they are somewhat or very protected from the effects of a disaster.

In this context, the average company experienced two computer outages caused by one or more of virus attack, hacking or data destruction (accidental or otherwise) in the past year.

Only 1 in 3 of those surveyed believed their customers would consider going elsewhere if they experienced a major outage.

Reality

27% of those same companies said one of their suppliers had been forced to shut down due to a disaster in the past year, with 39% of those shut-downs being for more than 8 hours. On a scale of 1 to 10, the degree of inconvenience was 6-7 and 59% said it affected their perception of the supplier.

Because of this, 42% of respondents said they had switched suppliers because of the unreliability of the suppliers computing systems.

Thus, although businesses believed their customers would not be unduly inconvenienced, that was not how they themselves felt in similar circumstances.

Planning and Backups

More than half (55%) of small medium business have no formal disaster recovery plan and only 1 in 5 (22%) backup daily. Even where backups are done, on average only 70% of company or customer data is backed up.

At the same time, half (51%) believe they would lose at least 40% of their data in a disaster.

Prevention is better than cure

Luckily, the recipe for closing this gap between perception and reality is simple:

• Determine your needs. Take the time to determine and understand what data is critical and needs to be secured and protected. Examples include financial, customer, personnel, regulatory and trade secrets.
• Engage trusted advisors. SMBs have limited time, budgets and resources. Use external experts who can deliver results more effectively and can be trusted to give best advice.
• Automate wherever possible. Tasks such as backup should be automated so that they always get done. Control your costs by automating processes and thus reduce human involvement.
• Test Regularly. Don’t leave it to the day of the disaster to discover that your backups won’t restore or the plan is ineffective. Investigate how you can employ non-intrusive exercises to test the integrity of your backups and hone the efficiency of the staff who will need to implement the plans.

What do you do?

Do you backup your data regularly? Do you restore some of it occasionally to make sure the backup is good?

This is a repost of an article from my previous blog but the content is still relevant.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd57bR8FKKQ

For me, the most interesting aspect is that, apart from the initial expletive and the increased breathing rate, there was no panic. Both aircrew knew exactly how to cope with the emergency and followed the pre-prepared plan without a hitch. Bear in mind that they they almost certainly had never actually experienced this situation before.

The key learning point is that they had a plan and they had practiced it, many times. The consequence was that they didn’t have to think too much in the early stages.

The pilot immediately pulled back on the stick to gain height, and therefore time. Time bought early on in a crisis is almost magical in nature and you only get the luxury of time if you can react quickly.

In my personal life, I am very slow to wake up. My reaction to this is that I have a pretty much invariable plan for the first 10 or so minutes of the day. That way, I can follow my plan and actually get up, dressed etc without having to think too much about it.

The obvious conclusion to be drawn from these examples is that a plan is of only minimal utility unless it has been exercised several times. Only by exercising a plan can you a) find the faults in the plan and fix them; and b) learn how to react quickly and thus buy precious time.

I want to share with you the ways and means by which I manage my life and actually get the right things done at the right time. I don’t claim my way is perfect, or that I always follow it, but I do find myself falling back on this approach when everything starts to get out of hand, as it sometimes does.

An analytical person

I am by nature a pretty analytical person. I guess that’s why I gravitated to engineering as a profession.

A butterfly

At the same time however, I can be a bit of a hare brain if I don’t concentrate. I’m easily distracted from the main task ahead, unless it is something “technical”; in which case I’ll disappear for hours.

Staying focused on the important

Over the years I have tried various ways to stay focused on the things that matter. There has been a lot of experimentation with different “systems” (Did I say I was analytical?).

I’ve tried Time Manager, Time System, various list based approaches and tools, but the one that works for me is Getting Things Done (GTD).

Getting Things Done

GTD was developed by David Allen and works very well for me. I won’t go into the details of how the process works because www.davidco.com contains a much better description than I could create.

Support Tools

To support the overall process of personal knowledge and task management I use a number of tools. Foremost amongst these are:

• Mind Mapping;
• Personal Brain; and
• Pomodoro Technique

Mind Mapping

Mind mapping is a graphical approach to capturing information. It was developed by Tony Buzan. See
www.thinkbuzan.com for more information.

I was lucky to be introduced to mind mapping at quite an early age. My school was given a talk by Tony Buzan when I was in the sixth form and the whole concept grabbed me immediately. I have always had problems with linear streams of information and far prefer to see information captured and displayed graphically.

I use it for (just about) everything

I use mind mapping for everything. Any note taking, brain storming, document production etc probably starts life as a mind map. Indeed this blog started as a mind map.

I use Mind Manager on the PC and on the Mac; mainly because I have used it since forever rather than because it is the best (though I have no reason to believe it isn’t).

The master to-do list

For the purposes of this blog topic, the key mind map is my to-do list. This contains both my objectives and my actual tasks.

The former are hierarchical so that I can see how low level objectives support high level (i.e. long term) objectives. The latter are segregated by context as per GTD.

Personal Brain

Personal Brain has been around for ages and I’ve used it since its first release. It’s very hard to describe, so take a look at www.thebrain.com. I think Personal Brain is a miracle product. It holds all the pieces of knowledge I have acquired over the years and provides a very easy to use UI to access and maintain it.

Like all the tools I use, it runs on both PC and Mac, though there are issues with linked files when viewing the same Plex through the two platforms.

Incidentally, if you’re wondering how I manage to keep all these files in sync across Mac and PC (multiple instances of both) I use Dropbox, another miracle product.

Connecting all the mind maps together

You won’t be surprised to find out that most of the nodes on my “Plex” are mind maps; though many are URLs and links to documents stored locally.

Pomodoro Technique

The Pomodoro Technique is a way to enhance ones focus on the things that need to be done in the day without getting (too) distracted. Full details can be found at http://www.pomodorotechnique.com

Execution of the day’s task list

I try to end each day by building a list of things to do the next day. Despite my addiction to mind maps, this list is actually a 3 x 5 card so I can carry it in my Moleskine journal. It takes the place of the Pomodoro to-do sheet.

After listing the things that have to be done the next day, I prioritise them. In general, priority is given to those tasks that move me towards the achievement of an objective, so regular tasks like reading mail tend to come pretty low.

An aside

I usually read my e-mail and other regular tasks late morning. I do check my e-mail on my phone first thing in the morning just to be sure nothing vital has come in overnight that will change my tasks or prioritisation, but that’s all.

Do one thing at a time and do it to completion

Having listed and prioritised the day’s tasks, next morning I use the Pomodoro Technique to concentrate solely on that task until it is complete, or until I can make no further progress. I find this discipline enhances my productivity enormously, provides tangible feedback regarding progress and gives me a sense of achievement as I cross out completed tasks.

At the end of the day, I delete the completed tasks from my To-Do mind map, add in any new tasks that arose during the day, make sure I haven’t missed any objectives, and then repeat the process of preparing the following day’s task list on a new card.

Conclusion

I realise that to other people, this may look like a very ad-hoc way of managing my time, but it works for me. It compensates for my extremely poor short term memory and tendency to get distracted and helps me concentrate on what is important.

In fact it turns me into the person I am when I put my mind to it.

How do you stay focused?

This is how I do it, but what do you do to plan those bits of your life that need planning, and how do you stay focused?

Image by Muffet