No matter what we do in our jobs, we all want to provide value back to the organizations where we work. With some jobs, tangible evidence of value is very apparent, such as hitting your sales quota or building code for a feature in your software. In business continuity, that can be a bit of a challenge. To start, most people don’t understand what it is, or what responsibilities are tied to it. If someone asks me what I do, and my response is: “business continuity,” the conversation usually goes a different direction shortly thereafter. This makes it a challenge from the get-go in showing value to your company.
Here are a few key principles I have learned in my business continuity journey, that have helped me show value within my organization:
Leadership buy-in
Real simple, your business continuity program has to have this in order to succeed. If you think you’re fully prepared to respond and recover from a disaster without buy-in from leadership, you’re kidding yourself. Leadership needs to understand what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and how it will benefit their department and the company as a whole. This will give you top-level support and make your job easier. Having guidance from above will ensure your requests for resources for the purposes of a business impact analysis and recovery testing will be given.
No doubt getting leaderships attention can be a challenge, but it has to happen. I have been a part of organizations that didn’t have it, and the result was a program that could never meet its full potential because our requests for time and effort from other departments were never a priority.
At Code42, we worked with each member of our executive leadership team to outline what we were doing, why we’re doing it and what assistance we would need from their department. Department leaders were then able to give direction on who they wanted us to work with and set the whole program in motion.
Narrow the scope of your program
On the surface this seems counterintuitive. Why not cover every function and supporting activity? The reasoning is that most companies don’t have a dedicated team of employees focused on business continuity. For some, business continuity is simply one of many responsibilities they hold. Along with manpower, the further you head into supporting functions and away from what’s really critical, the lower the rate of return for the company. The key is to focus on what’s critical. I have experienced it firsthand, where my drive to make sure all business functions were documented and prepared for. It had me spending countless hours covering the full spectrum of the business. By the time I was finished, the data was already out of date and amounted to poor use of resources with little to no value for the company.
When we worked with each member of the executive leadership team at Code42, we kept our scope to the top two critical functions that each department performs. This helped our program avoid the minutiae and focus squarely on what’s critical for supporting our product, our customers and our employees.
Make the information accessible
The information for your business continuity program should not be sequestered away from your employees, it should be easy to view and update. This is a rather obvious statement, but one that I have seen many companies struggle with. Here at Code42, we made a misstep by thinking the solution to our business continuity challenges lie within a continuity software provider. The intent was for it to help us manage all of our data, produce plans and be a one-stop shop for all things business continuity. Not long after onboarding, challenges started to emerge. The biggest challenge, was the information was not accessible to the workforce. The other was that it didn’t tie in to any software already in use at Code42. It was on an island, and of little to no value to the business. A pivot was needed, and thankfully we didn’t have to go far for an answer.
The answer came from taking a step back and determining what tools employees use across the company on a day-to-day basis. For us, the answer laid within Confluence, which serves as our internal wiki. This is where we build out department focused pages and their respective critical functions, and dependencies. Connecting to Confluence allowed us to tie in another company-wide application, JIRA, for tickets related to vendor assessments and risk and incident tickets. Our focus throughout the process was to ensure value was being passed on to Code42 and its employees, and the key piece to that was having information easily accessible.
Business continuity has a number of inherent challenges, but if ensuring value to the company is at the center of your decisions it will go a long way in leading to a successful program. I hope these principles I laid out help you provide better value to your own company.
Connect with Loren Sadlack on LinkedIn.