Raising awareness of your business continuity programme

You’ve built the project, you’ve followed the BCI advice, you’ve even referenced PAS56. You have your steering group, your budget and your strategies. You’ve analysed your business, developed your plans and you’ve tested them. It’s tempting now to pat yourself on the back and wait for the next cycle of reviews and tests to start all over again. But don’t!

Only when people understand their role in a response and recovery situation can the plan succeed when it needs to. Raising awareness of your business continuity programme is paramount to its success but is a stage often underrated or even overlooked.

13th –19th March is this year’s Business Continuity Awareness Week. It is your chance to make sure that the decision makers (and those who follow them) know what you have planned. This gives your plans the chance to succeed and your organization the chance of coping with the unexpected.

The principle of dedicating time to BC awareness is valid and it’s one we fully support. For many of us, however, our professional responsibilities can make it tricky to always fit in with external dates, so here’s what we advocate: rather than promise to yourself that you’ll be fully ready next year, why not make your own BC Awareness Week, whenever you can? Take the time to prepare your activities and schedule them according to what’s going on with your organization. That way, you don’t have to wait another year to take part in this really useful initiative.

So what could your BC Awareness Week contain? The BCI gives some great ideas regarding what you can use this week for, activities you can plan, documents you can publish. Here are some ideas we’ve found useful too.

Why not develop an online presentation for Business Continuity Awareness – what business continuity means for the business and what it means for individuals? This could be rolled out to all staff, maybe over the web, though your own networks or on CDs. It would introduce the concepts of BC and invite people to find out more.

The presentation, which is aimed at all staff, all levels, could be supplemented by a more specific message for those likely to play a key role in a response / recovery phase. This might include instructions regarding work area recovery (relocation), IT expectations, call trees and so on. You could coincide your BC Awareness Week with the launch of your own fold-out cards for out of hours contact numbers, you could wage a poster campaign with images of what’s gone wrong in other organsiations using straplines such as: Where would you go now? What would you do next?

It’s also a good time to review and reissue your fire and bomb procedures, as these are most visible and easily remembered by staff. And don’t forget your executive – maybe this is a good time to rehearse your crisis plans or at least to walk them through in a desktop environment. And if you can’t have the test in that particular week, then at least publish your test schedule – anything to let your colleagues know what you are doing, and that it is useful.

Use all and any space to get your message across – can you have an article on your intranet or in your company magazine? Can you have slots at your management briefings? Can you print a slogan on coffee stirrers? Can you print balloons and banners? Whatever your budget, fix a timescale to suit, and tell everyone about your Business Continuity programme.

Because afterall, to paraphrase Robert Burns: ‘The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry’. Awareness is key.

Chris Vale and Sarah Morgan