First Steps
AHSRC’s Yates says the starting point for any organisation’s BCP should be asking what the impact of a range of different incidents, such as an earthquake, a tidal wave, an electricity blackout, will be upon the organisation.
Next, an impact analysis should be conducted for each incident: how it will affect demand and supply, workers, the overall business, financial systems, occupational health and safety, etc.
Based on this, organisations need to come up with a mitigation strategy: what staff should do, how quickly to get the executive team involved, how quickly certain provision need to be rolled out.
The organisation then needs to create an incident response group for each incident and an overall business continuity team, Yates says.
“The incident response group looks after the minute-by-minute response to an issue. They deal with the here and now -- getting everybody out of the building if it’s on fire,” he says. “Then you transfer over to the business continuity process, which is more about, ‘what do we do tomorrow?’ and ‘how do we work around this?’”
According to DLA Phillips Fox’s Duckett, the current spate of power outages in Sydney and the looming threat of swine flu should prove a strong motivator to get the country’s BCPs in shape.
“You tend to ignore these things until there is pain,” Duckett says. “Pain is a wonderful way to focusing people’s thoughts on what to do to avoid it in the future.”
SIDEBAR: Key Points for Organisational Pandemic Planning
Hayes Consulting offers these key tips for an effective Pandemic business continuity plan
- Decide that you need to have a pandemic plan and be clear about its objectives of the plan.
- Identify critical services which the organisation needs to supply during a pandemic. You may find that under the stress of a pandemic you simply can’t provide the internal and external services you normally do.
- Back up all key service inputs: what are the things you require to provide each service -- critical people, key computer systems, etc? You also need to protect those inputs - in particular, the staff, by preventing cross infection. You need a regime of training and awareness, and a set of policy and procedures , and equipment to stop people cross-infecting each other in the advent of a full blown pandemic.
- Prepare for alternative work arrangements that achieve social distancing. That is, change or stagger working hours, activate remote worksites, working from home. In order to do that you have to set up the IT infrastructure in advance of the pandemic so it in place and ready to go.
- Plan for staff absenteeism rates of 50 percent. That doesn’t mean 50 percent of staff will get sick, but that 50 percent of the staff may be absent through things like schools and child care centre being closes and therefore parents needing to be at home.