Preparing for emergencies
Submitted by: Adrian Boylan, Assistant Director, Management Services Division
March 31st 2004
Scope, the leading disability charity in the UK, was faced with a problem familiar to all campaigning and service providing charities: a reliance on information as the lifeblood of the business, a workload which made business continuity planning seem less than urgent, and a lack of money to spend on averting a disaster which might never happen, when we are expected by our supporters to devote all available resources to averting disasters in people's everyday lives.For any corporate plan to work in reality, it was obviously important to involve the managers of individual departments, and to ensure that there was a short-term benefit for them in participating wholeheartedly in the process. We also recognised that, although IT seemed a natural "home" for business continuity planning, because it is something that IT managers do (or should do) instinctively, a real business continuity plan extends way beyond the resurrection of IT systems into the practicalities of carrying on an effective business function when suddenly deprived of all the facilities we rely on at our normal workplace.
Scope is a dispersed organisation with over 400 premises in England and Wales, including high street shops, residential schools, administrative centres and residential and day care premises used by disabled people. Each of these sites has to plan for safety and continuity of services appropriate to its local needs: our brief was to address the business continuity planning needs of our head office in Islington, north London, where the administration of this complex organisation is centred.
The project brought together a team representing the key interests of IT, property management, internal communications, human resources, finance and insurance. These were the individuals who would be looked to cope with the material and human consequences of a disaster, or just a temporary loss of function. Between us we devised a timed action plan of processes to be carried out from the moment a business continuity planning situation was identified to the resumption of near-normal services.
But what kind of a business continuity planning situation to plan for was one of the initial questions which the group struggled with. Our premises sits above a steep-sided railway cutting one mile north of Kings Cross Station. A major train accident might not threaten the stability of the building's foundations, but could still render the area inaccessible to all but emergency services for several days. Our location has already been subject to frequent power cuts over the last 2 years, attributed to excavations for the European Rail Terminal in the vicinity. We had to decide how to plan both for major disasters - the building reduced to rubble - and for the less dramatic, but far more probable interruptions which could interfere with business for an indeterminate number of days.
An initial survey established what the real day-to-day working population of the building was (fluctuating below the 200 mark), and gave us a benchmark against which to measure the capacity of the market for temporary alternative premises. For Scope particularly, as for any employer, ensuring a replacement premises would be accessible to disabled staff and visitors was an absolute priority. Scope is fortunate in having a second office premises at a safe distance away in south London, so we were able to designate space there as the temporary HQ of the emergency response group nominated to coordinate business recovery and to deal with communications with the media, families of staff and service users, and with our the local authorities with whom we are in contract.
The key engagement with staff and mangers came in the form of a business continuity planning guide and questionnaire which was walked through with each respondent, and which formed the "local" business continuity planning for every one of the 25 separate departments operating from HQ. This required them to document their individual response to a disruptive event under the following headings:
In addition, members of the emergency response group had to consider their own special responsibilities: identifying those who could assist in relocation, trauma counselling, ensuring banking facilities while income processing was disrupted, and so on.
Although the exercise wasn't exactly welcomed with open arms by our managers, and required persistence to get participation, they saw the necessity of it, and the immediate benefit of sorting out their data management and some basic staff housekeeping issues. Prior to this exercise, most managers had not thought of keeping a list of staff contact details at home: the emergency telephone tree we have set up now ensures that all staff could be contacted and warned to stay away from the office in a few minutes of a disaster being declared.
Now managers know which of their staff have PCs and email addresses at home, and would be able to work effectively from home during a period of disruption. They have sorted essential from non-essential files in computers and filing cabinets, and ensured that the items they really want to keep are either on the network (instead of their own PCs) or photocopied and stored off-site (and their locations are recorded). Hopefully we will never have to put the full disaster recovery pan into action, but preparing for it has helped us significantly in addressing day-to-day issues of data security, legal data protection, and personnel management. This is the benefit recognised by the department heads who were obliged to take responsibility for their element of the collective plan.
Any form of record-keeping has to be regularly maintained, and a review of each department's business continuity planning has become part of our annual risk review exercise. And to make sure that no-one was forgetting to complete their own, each department's business continuity planning is published on the intranet when completed. This makes auditing and comparisons between overlapping plans easy to carry out.
Key elements of our approach therefore were: