10 Simple Planning Actions to Increase Your Consistency of Exceeding Customer Expectations

Many executives ask themselves: “I know the basics about critical processes and mission-critical systems but what can I do to really make a difference in our ability to consistently exceed our customer’s expectations?”

 One way is to focus on increasing your business value and to sustain that value regardless of expected or unexpected circumstances. Below are 10 planning actions that you can take to support your mission critical value proposition.

10. Don’t be satisfied with a computer backup plan.  When your clients ask what’s the #1 reason they should use your company, do you say it’s your technology?  Probably not.  Why are you relying on technology to save you in a disaster?

9. Ask questions.  What are your employees doing in their personal lives for emergency readiness?  What are their concerns?  How can you help them?

8. Talk about operational risk and continuity management in business strategy meetings.  Talking is the first step to integrating it into the corporate culture.

7. Don’t count on vendors to pick up your slack in an emergency.  If it’s not written into your contract don’t put it in your plan.  Even then, always have a backup plan.

6. Know when to say there’s a problem.  Chances are you’re not going to be the one to first notice something is wrong.  If you are ignoring business deficiencies, others are too.

5. Know your emergency response plan.  Every natural hazard has a professional group that monitors it and knows how to respond.  The response plans are usually free online.  Get a good plan for the basic natural disasters in your area.  Keep it simple and your bases covered.

4. Don’t focus on the fear.  It’s easy to look at the unlimited disaster scenarios and get overwhelmed.  Instead look at what’s really important – a strong business plan.

3. Make a list of what is really important to your business.  Keep it short – not more than ten points (tops!).  Share it with everyone – your boss, your employees, your clients, your partners.

2. Build relationships with three key responders.  This could be your local police department or a criticalvendor.  The point is being on a first name basis with the person who has the answers you’re going to need during your emergency.

1. Create a solid employeecommunications plan and test it quarterly or more often.  People are your greatest asset; know how to connect with them.  Set standards and make them clear.

Still unsure or need help developing a road map to make your path simple?  We’re here for you.  Call now for a free consultation.    888-297-PLAN

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A Case Study in backing up data . . . .

We recently formed a relationship to manage the continuity program for a new client. At the start of the discovery phase, we had a hearty discussion about backup practices.  The new client used a well-known and reputable local data backup provider but had not thoroughly fleshed out the agreement or contractual obligations with them. Though our client was very confident in the services they were receiving, after reviewing the contract we were still uncertain how the provider supported testing or recovery of the backup data.

With reservations, but in response to our urging, the client contacted their supplier and, after several weeks and many discussions with varying levels of management – leading up to the owner – he found that, while they were backing up a great deal of data, the backup files were wrong for their core processing system to start recovery.  In fact, key files they would absolutely need during any recovery procedure were not getting backed up at all because they labeled them as “backup files” – not required for critical processing during usual business.  The backup system was simply filtering them out.  Clearly we were not concerned with business as usual!

Though our client had previously felt very sure of their recovery capabilities and had, for several years, paid a first-class disaster recovery provider to back their data up, the system had never been analyzed to recognize its clear flaws.  While the provider was technically holding up their end of the contract, our client would never have been able to recover from any data loss impacting their core system.  Because of a few simple questions and conversations with the back up and core process vendors, this client now has a better sense of certainty with evidence to prove his recovery capabilities!

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Not just Surviving – THRIVING!

Continuity management has long been tied to disaster planning and crisis response as fundamental to emergency planning but the reality is: If you’re just practicing business continuity to survive you’re never going to get much out of it.

The key to effective value creation from continuity management is a strategy that builds on how the day-to-day business is designed to create value. Today’s global market puts us all in crisis. Corporate directors are in jail. Cyber terrorists can easily hide across borders around world yet still access information kept locked away. States and countries declare bankruptcy. Instability is everywhere.
Businesses are so interdependent on one another that supply chain and technology are complex grey zones of value and accountability. The bottom line is the business needs to create value to survive. Maybe value means money, maybe it’s customer satisfaction or maybe it’s serving its nonprofit goal. Regardless, the creation of that value must be the crux of your resilience plans.

One of the most common misconceptions of business continuity planning is that it starts with a disaster and in a lucky world no one would need a plan. Luck favors the prepared. A business with a healthy continuity management program doesn’t just survive crisis; it thrives daily. The reality of the business world is that every day is more complex and risk loaded. In order to work toward corporate maturity and institutionalization of the systems that create value you have to structure and live your plan.

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Understanding Climate Change to Build Sustainable Small Businesses

Business readiness is essential to increase one’s chances of business survival. Ensuring a business is ready for any threat includes preparing for extreme weather. According to a recent survey by AXA Group insurance three out of four respondents believe future climate will become more extreme more often, while only five percent believe the weather will become calmer. 88% of the respondents believe that it is possible to limit the consequences of climate change.  Understanding how climate change might impact your business is essential to making a preparation plan and having it ready to implement when necessary.  

As small businesses are integral to any economy, it is imperative that they develop independent and complementary programs across their industry to stay competitive and afloat in tomorrow’s shifting climates. Since all economies are dependent on this vulnerable sector, development of strong and actionable  response plans is essential to national and global stability.

Recent examples of climate disaster include Hurricane Sandy, the typhoon that precipitated the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, and the many F5 tornadoes in central Oklahoma. Business Continuity Consulting Oklahoma lighting more severe and frequent climate variations, businesses will need to re-assess and re-engineer their existing disaster risk management practices. The greater and more pronounced the climate change, the greater the disruption to product and service creation and delivery. Unlike larger organizations that tend to adapt to recurrent disruptions, small organizations cannot devote as many resources as frequently. Thus, small organizations must learn how to plan and implement climate change adaptation plans more efficiently and fluidly.

Developing rapid response and implementation plans for increased and more severe climate change are beneficial not just for climate change. Having a plan in place and ready to execute helps small businesses respond to and minimize damages in response to many threats. The same plan that helps small businesses respond to natural disasters can help businesses become profitable by offering technology that helps consumers and other businesses work through a disaster toolkit

There are many things a new or existing climate change response plan can benefit from. Taking into account new weather predictions, business survival plans should implement the following steps:

1. Create a plan:  Developing a plan is essential to know what to do beforehand. When an emergency is imminent, there will only be time for execution.             
2. Insurance:  What is and what is not covered. Based on the organization’s budget, assets, and an assessment of what needs to be covered will help determine the best type of insurance policy.
3. Weatherproofing:  What aspects of the business can and cannot sustain a natural disaster. Looking at purchasing products that come weather-proofed and what existing fixtures need to be weather-proofed is essential to respond effectively to future weather events.       
4. Data backup:  Developing a system to ensure all data is safe in case of a natural disaster. This can include data virtual or site backup.

Each organization has different needs and goals. Therefore, climate change response plans must be individualized for each organization's needs and future goals. While many organizations have planned for short-term needs, planning for long-term needs, in light of rapidly changing weather and the increased frequency of weather disasters necessitates long-term planning. Along with planning, organizations that are able to adapt efficiently will help their organizations survive and thrive despite any emergency, weather or otherwise. More info visit on http://www.dcsplanning.com

Exercising for Safety and Soundness

Yes, for the next year or two your bank examiner may make the mistake of crediting you for exercising your disaster plan when you documented an actual crisis but let’s take a step back and think about this before we consider it a “win”.
Experiencing a crisis or disruption does not meet the standard for exercising your plan and should not be adequate to count as testing your plan for many reasons. Including:

1. Under best practice continuity management guidelines it is clear that establishing and testing an exercise program is not the same as documenting events that threaten or impact the business. These are two separate best practices.
2. FFIEC examination guidelines state “The board and senior management should establish a testing program appropriate for the size, complexity, and risk profile of the organization and its business lines”. Passively experiencing crisis does not demonstrate a testing program has been established and, no matter what the extent of the crisis, will it be appropriate for the size, complexity and risk profile of the organization. In fact, it may be counter productive and make you look unprepared because you didn’t plan a test.
3. Community banks are likely to have experienced 6-12 crises in a year. What makes this one particularly meaningful? Did you document the other ones? What are your standards for documentation?
4. Test objectives were not set or met (no, “survival” does not count) and only one part of your response plan was tested. The “test” was not comprehensive.
5. Since you weren’t planning to experience this problem, exercise controls were not in place when you had it. You can only manage what you measure.
6. Hypothetically, would you consider going to the emergency room because you thought you might be having a heart attack to be an indicator for your ability to deal with stress? Technically the answer is “Yes”. However, that’s certainly no way to live and if this is your common practice then it indicates you don’t really have a good plan for your health. The same is true for your organization. Why have a heart attack to wait to check and see if your blood pressure is too high? It’s easier to use a blood pressure cuff and check your heart rate.

Let’s speak the truth: This is not the attitude of a healthy, mature business and will not, for much longer, meet requirements for safety and soundness.
Now, before you get frustrated, I realize you don’t want to do continuity management this way. You have a LOT on your plate that you’d rather be getting to (call reports anyone?) and you’re just not sure where to get started. So, DCS has set up some fantastic tools to make planning exercising EASY for you! Get excited now and bookmark this for future reference! First, go ahead and log that problem you had on our FREE Crisis Event Log. It’s got a couple of brief questions to help you get down the information you need to learn from and properly document the problem.

Next, use our FREE Strategic Road Mapto get an idea about what a good, well-rounded financial institution can do on to build operational strength. NO, you don’t have to do that big fail-over test right away. We actually recommend against it. Start drilling the little things first. Can you guarantee that you can contact everyone when they’re not at work? Try your call tree out and write down what happens. That’s a great test!
Another quick tip is to see what your IT provider is doing to test regularly. We often find out the IT department regularly tests failover procedures but rarely documents it adequately for oversight or examination requirements. All you have to do is start documenting! It’s easy! You can do that!

We have also started a new product line: DIY Turnkey Continuity. We’re building very strong key kits for your continuity tool case at affordable prices. We’ve started with a data breach kit and will be releasing an exercise kit before the end of the summer. For our BOL friends, we are looking for pilot users to test these at a discounted rate! Private message me if you’re interested. Also let me know what other kits you’re interested in. Pandemic, social media and vendor management are on our list for 2013.
I hope these ideas help out. We realize you are doing everything you can to keep compliant and the business moving in a positive direction. Please let us know what else we can do to make your job easier!

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DCS Planning Business Continuity Consulting

Consider a complex manufacturing and logistics organisation, based at the North Pole, traditionally very busy around the 25th December. As you might imagine, planning for this event takes all year – no sooner has Santa Claus sat down on Boxing Day then he’’s called to deal with all sorts of unplanned events that require attention.

This year, it started early. Santa was putting the sleigh in the garage when he was accosted by Mrs Claus.
““What are these reports on the radio about you kissing somebody’’s Mommy?”” she demanded.
““W, w, what? Who?”” Santa stammered.

Santa was able to explain that there must have been a case of mistaken identity. Santa’’s image had taken a battering at the hands of an imposter. He was straight onto his Incident Management Team and, following a quick injunction and a public apology, his reputation was restored. He couldn’’t afford for his customers to think he was in anyway naughty.

February brought ice storms to the North Pole.

““Sir, it’’s too cold for the employees to work,”” his Elf and Safety Manager told him, “”I have instructed the elves to down tools.””

Santa sighed and reached for the Yellow Pages, “”Hello, heat engineers? It’s just possible you could save my elves…”.”

Despite the interruption, with a bit of overtime, the Elves were soon back on schedule.
Things carried on uninterrupted until spring saw flocks of birds returning from their winter habitats. Concern rose amongst Santa’’s employees that the wild birds may bring the H5N1 avian flu virus with them, giving rise to concerns about an epidemic. Santa consulted the WHO website for the latest advice.

““There’’s currently little risk for us, the birds are returning from countries where there has been no recorded H5N1 outbreaks, but to be sure, I’’ll employ a couple of special wardens specifically to keep an eye on the well-being of the birds”” he told his elves, hoping that he wouldn’’t have to employ more wardens when the wild reindeer herds returned. He’’d read that the Blue Tongue virus was spreading north and already had problems with one of his sleigh crew having a red nose….

The summer holidays always presented Santa with problems, bored children with too much time on their hands were always on the lookout to cause mischief. This year Santa’’s IT partners informed him one morning that his “Naughty or Nice” database had been hacked! The status of all the children had been changed and there was no way they could sort it out.

Fortunately Santa is pretty tech-savvy. He didn’’t panic and instructed his IT department to delete the data and restore from the back up. As extra insurance, he asked for a full virus check to be undertaken, arranged for the firewall firmware to be updated and instructed all the elves to change their passwords.

There were no further problems to distract Santa. Come the 24th, the Elves loaded up the sleigh and the reindeer team was harnessed. Santa clambered up into the driving seat, picked up the reins with one hand and turned the sleigh’s ignition with the other. There was a short croak and then nothing. He turned the key again, with the same result. Santa realised that when he had been managing his reputation issues last year, he’’d forgotten to turn the sleigh headlights off. The battery had gone flat.

Fortunately, on Mrs Claus’ insistence, the date was the 24th of November and Santa and Elves were running an exercise. Sure, Santa hated having to squeeze into his suit before his annual diet had worked off all the previous year’s mince pies, the Elves got cranky at having to load and unload the sleigh and the reindeer team disliked being taken from their warm stables, but Mrs Claus had seen the benefits of exercising ahead of “the “big off””. The battery was rigged up to the charger and, come the big day, all the good children received the right presents thanks to Santa’’s business continuity arrangements….

Just a bit of fun!  Special thanks to Richard Jones!

Eryn Tribble is a certified Associated Business Continuity Professional (ABCP) who offers experience and expertise in Business Continuity Management (BCM) with a focus on employees as the company’s greatest asset and human management in continuity.  Eryn’s BCM understanding ranges from implementing continuity as a project to infusing resilience into the practice of business. She is a dedicated risk specialist with a specialty in finance and commodity trade and supply.  Having worked within global supply chains and trade houses, Eryn brings a unique perspective on diversity and resilience.
Visit- http://www.dcsplanning.com