Today, I wish to discuss real life planning for disasters, emergencies, setbacks, and failures.  This is affectionately called Continuity of Operations Planning (COOP) to you Information Technology (IT) Professionals out there.  It is often undertaken as a huge, enterprise scale project involving outside consultants, big budgets, and huge stakeholder involvement.  I wish to bring it back down to ground level a little bit.  Let’s face it, at this time of year, the weather gets bad, people get sick, and many key employees take lots of vacation time.  No matter what, your chances of having trouble goes up in the winter and your resources to deal with that problem are usually more limited.

globe on fire

I think that some of the best COOP planning comes not from outside your team, but inside.  They know the weak points, vulnerabilities, and key people much better than strangers.  When is the last time that you asked them for this type of input?  Start with some simple exercises such as:

  • What is the most likely piece of hardware to fail here?
  • Who are the people who are irreplaceable?
  • What skill set only rests in one individual?
  • What data are we not backing up?
  • What catastrophe could occur that would prevent us from recovering?
  • How fast do we need to be back up? How fast can we do it?
  • How do we know that our back-ups are good?
  • What exterior resources do we need and only have one source of?

These questions alone should generate enough projects to keep you busy for a bit if your IT organization is like most.  The key is to dedicate the resources to discovery and planning to mitigate the challenges.  Then you absolutely must:

  • Document your plan
  • Document your answers to the challenges
  • Eliminate the single points of failure.
  • Institutionalize means to prevent recurrence of the same vulnerabilities.
  • Exercise your plans and procedures.
  • Create a method of recurring discovery, correction, and continuous improvement in COOP.
  • Educate your stakeholders, employees, management, customers and suppliers on your COOP capabilities and plans.

There are certainly hundreds of different scenarios of problems that would require you to execute some portion of your COOP plan.  The key is not to get overwhelmed by the diversity and fail to act, document, and exercise.  Do not let the complexity freeze you into inaction or hopelessness.  This is a case where an ounce of prevention and forethought really can give you that 80% solution to 90% of the possible problems.  Don’t let another day go by… start your COOP planning today!

Please share your thoughts on this topic with us.  I am especially interested in how this subject is viewed by small businesses as opposed to huge IT enterprises.  How does it differ between public and private sectors?  Share below.

That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for November 17, 2009  by Scott Coughlin.

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