What are the key components of a Contingency Plan?

Looking at the various makeshift websites that sell plan generators and templates you would think that you need to spend months of effort documenting every nut and bolt, telephone number and insurance policy.

Ironically, some of the sites even profess to provide a “cheaper and more pragmatic alternative to “expensive consultants”" – clearly these people are ignoring the amount of time that people would spend downloading, trying to fathom and then complete their left-brain tomes of regurgitated disaster recovery and millenium bug bunkum that they carried out in a cardboard box when they got paid off from their IT consultancy in the late 80s.

Busines Continuity and Contingency Plans for SMEs don’t need to be complicated or lengthy but they do need to be simple, mobile, well-understood and current.

For extra points they should also be tested through practices and drills – a minimum being a documented annual fire drill if you have premises.

Veterus Consulting Limited offers a 1-day workshop called “BCMlite” that helps SMEs to put together an outline contingency plan for the majority of likely business disruptions by focusing on outcomes – resulting from the disruption and the response.

This approach avoids the creation of 6ft high lockable cabinets of “shelf-ware” detailing the specific response to everything from a tea-spill to a tornado.

You don’t need specific plans for specific disruptions if you focus on outcomes (OK, I’ll allow you an addendum or 2 if you insist).

In the BCMLite workshops, we work through a simple 5-step process based around our MEDIC approach which identifies the 20% of core activities and actions needed to deliver 80% of the business’s core outputs.

In a nutshell, the MEDIC mnemonic prompts consideration of:

• Manpower (Command & Control, Minimum safe staffing levels)
• Equipment (Fallback modes, RTO, RPO, ASOS)
• Data (Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability)
• Infrastructure (including transport, security and supply chain)
• Communications (internal, external, media)

With such a demand for contingency plans and templates evident across most of the search engines we’ll probably offer a MEDIC template and some guidance for completion so that SMEs can develop a basic plan if they are so inclined but our experience is that most people benefit from a bit of mentoring and support even if it is on the phone.

What we can promise is that our template won’t take weeks to complete so in terms of return on time and money it should be the best option – unless of course you really get off on creating and maintaining lists

If you are interested in learning more, drop us an e mail.  We’re also planning to run some BCMlite workshops in Hampshire, Dorset, West Sussex and Berkshire during the Autumn term.

Who knows, you might even get an outline plan in place before the worst of the swine flu epidemic if you book early!