As a resilience and business continuity consultant you are under additional pressure to maintain continuity of service to your customers come hell or high water so I am glad to be coming out of the other side of moving home for the first time in 8 years.

The key to managing any disruption is of course prior preparation but sometimes circumstances conspire against you and you end up falling back on the resilience that you have built into your day to day operations to cover off any gaps.

We’ve set up Veterus to work remotely from any customer location, anywhere in the world but I also have a home-based office which acts as the operational hub for my other businesses and personal administration, so the office was carefully archived and packed up before the team of 6 removal staff arrived and turned our house into a flurry of packing tape, paper and cardboard boxes (I was stuck in a rib on the Solent providing safety cover for 50 sailing cadets at the time).

Key documents and files were carefully separated into boxes which I marked on 3 surfaces so that they could still be identified when stacked in a pile (a trick I learned when working with the Royal Logistics Corps).  Even more vital, time-critical items were completely removed from the removal sphere of influence and placed safely in the boot of my car.  Cash, keys and mobile phones/PDAs were of course kept on my person (I was wearing a dry-suit at sea so my pockets were safe).

Our Internet Service Provider failed to attend for the pre-arranged appointment to switch our 10MB broadband on at the new house so I had to fall-back to a plug-in broadband modem and my Iphone is reduced to paperweight functionality because the blessed O2 signal is totally inadequate at our new postcode.  Thankfully, I have a Blackberry Pearl on Vodaphone as a fall-back which as ever has a full strength signal.

Without these 2 pre-planned actions life could have been more complicated!