Click on the play button below for a short but comprehensive explanation of business continuity planning and how to do it from Managing Director, Bradley Wright:

Please leave any comments and questions below and I will answer them…

As TUC members vote today in favour of joint action to protest against the forthcoming cuts to public sector budgets we consider what public and private sector organizations can do to minimise the damage to their cash-flow and reputation from industrial action and other disruptions that reduce the number of staff available for work through effective business continuity management planning.

During our fast-track BusinessMEDIC workshops, the first consideration after understanding the business aims and objectives is to determine the minimum number of staff needed to deliver critical products and services to the standards required by contracts and business objectives.

It’s often surprising to clients that their organization is able to function adequately for a fortnight or more with only a handful of key staff that are suitably trained and empowered to make executive decisions, execute contracts and expend cash – but that is the reality in many companies.

Of course manufacturers, airline operators and other safety and people intensive business may not fair so well without staff so they need to make alternative arrangements to meet their key outputs by other means such as outsourcing or employment of agency or other staff if unionised workforces will not cooperate.

Employing alternative staff is most effective when they have prior knowledge and experience in the tasks for which they are employed but a lot can be achieved through carefully written and tested procedures and processes which can greatly reduce the training time and supervision ratios needed to deliver safe, repeatable performance of most tasks.

Trades that require considerable skill of hand may be less straighforward to replace on a short-term basis but careful forward planning can identify alternative sources of supply at home and abroad.  Customers may also be used to longer delivery times for bespoke pieces and it may be possible to negotiate a revised delivery date in exchange for a price reduction or other incentive to protect the customer relationship.

Other alternatives would include taking the opportunity to reduce headcount and improve resilience to inustrial action by investing in new plant andmachinery that is highly automated and requires little setting up.  In the early eighties with mass-vane-damper control systems you’d need an army of “fitters” and “control engineers” to set up and continually recalibrate endlessly drifting potentiometers and other analogue wizardry, but computerised, solid state systems are much more reliable and consistent than their predecessors and could allow significant reductions in headcount – assuming these have not already been made.

Another option is to re-look at the overall processes to see which parts might be outsourced to others without losing your competetive advantage.  For example, a former client who made security doors had the capability to begin with a tree at the left hand side of a dream workshop full of every joiner’s Christmas list but replacing and commissioning this capability after a fire would have been pointless, expensive and time-consuming when compared with the alternative plan of sourcing the component parts to suitable quality standards from any number of national or international joinery shops then assembling the pieces to make the killer product.

“But we’re not in the public sector!” you cry.  Well that’s fine but much of what you do is doubtless impacted by prolonged or short-notice firefighters strikes, mail worker strikes and especially disruptions to refuse collection and transport services so you need to plan ahead and look at how you can minimise the effects on your business.

We haven’t had national strikes since the 70′s when the military and probably police services were considerably larger and well equipped to support the government than they are now.  There aren’t boxfulls of soldiers, sailors and airmen sat twiddling their thumbs in barracks and dockyards up and down the country, nor do they own a lot of the kit they’d need to help if they weren’t in afghanistan or elsewhere.  Much of the defence world has “benefited” from contractor logistic support and civilianisation of posts to the degree that it’s run on a hired shoestring through a cascading array of service level agreements and other mumbo jumbo which translates to “no we don’t have any people, cranes,  boats or planes to help with the strike minister – terribly sorry.”

So if you want to protect your business from damage, disruption and loss as a 21st century winter of discontent looms, you’d be well advised to give us a call so we can check your plans, help you test them or put them together from scratch.  You know it makes sense..

For more information on the TUC vote, click here or visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11278570

Baroness Hine yesterday published her independent report into the swine flu (h1N1) outbreak in 2009 and praised the overall response as being very satisfactory despite some £20m worth of vaccine being procured and not used.

My own experience as one of the professionals hired to manage the outbreak and later plan and execute a mass vaccinations programme for 300,000 citizens indicates that despite this high praise, there are lessons to learn – which is why I’ve carefully titled this post because I do not think the lessons will be learned – yet.

My 3 key observations:

1. The NHS had to invent a logistics chain from scratch to distribute both the vaccine (cold chain) and associated consumables (needles etc) from a central hub or hubs through to the end users (mainly nurses in primary and secondary care settings).  This despite the fact that the NHS has been running for many years and been through 5 years of supposed planning and testing in order to evidence compliance with it’s statutory responsibilities under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.  The entire logistics organization o health could be and should be consolidated and streamlined (like the army, navy and air force have done in the Defence Logistics Organization (now D&ES)) which would improve efficiency and doubtless save a few £billion – really!
2. The medical profession appear to be the most undisciplined bunch I’ve come across in terms of following policy and instructions.  Every man jack of them seems to have a different opinion and they appear to instantly polarise when presented with an expert opinion on something.  This significantly undermined the take-up of vaccine within the health community as senior and relatively junior staff told anyone who would listen “I’m not having it – I don;t think it’s safe, it’s being rushed through, we don;t trust the CMO” etc.  I had one senior member of staff in charge of vaccinating an entire PCT who was pregnant with twins and fought against the jab for weeks; influencing colleagues against it by her misguided leadership – then suddenly panicked nad rolled up her sleeve when a couple of pregnant women lost their unborn babies and die.  Had this virus been more virulent her goos would have been truly cooked – of course I’m used to dealing with weaponised biological agents so maybe my decision threshold is sharper!
3. Warning and informing the public was both excellent and hopeless.  On the one hand we had the carefully crafted films and leaflets (once they finally got out) and the BBC news coverage with the excellent Fergus Walsh.  On the other hand we had utter indecision and an abject failure to TELL health professionals what they MUST do in order to protect the public.  This lack of clear leadership totally undermined the mass vaccinations programme; slowing take-up and compounding the negativity radiated by the heretical “health professionals” who put their uninformed (in most cases) opinion against the CMO and SHA advice; thereby undermining public confidence.  In the PCT that I worked the Chief Executive and Board Members consistently avoided the entire subject of pandemic – fiddling whilst Rome burned – and the Consultant in charge of infection control dithered and faffed about ordering hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of equipment and storing it instead of issuing it!  Again, had this been a more virulent outbreak, thousands would have lost their lives through their inaction.

In summary, the headlines of the report do not due justice to the reality that there is much work still to do in health before it can proclaim itself agile to opportunities and resilient to disruption.  Hopefully, some of the lessons identified might transfer into good practice – butI’m not so sure.

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