Please read this valuable article from one of our trusted partners. Jim Christensen with JCBCM Consulting helps business owners protect against damaging events that can interrupt a businesses lifeblood. If you do not have a business continuity plan, please contact Jim.

Make your worst nightmare merely a bad dream!

Fires, power outages, your network is hacked, rains cause heavy flooding, a hazmat accident near your facility, a construction back-hoe rips up the fiber-optics going into the building, disgruntled employees steal intellectual property, the list goes on and on. Disasters happen every day. Check out any news source today…bad things happen to good companies. It is an unfortunate fact of life.

After a disaster strikes your company, your clients may be sympathetic, but your company will still be expected to meet its critical business objectives in order to stay successfully in business. That is your bottom-line no matter what else happens. “Being down” puts you at risk of losing current clients, potential clients, your revenue stream, your future, and your business. The ostrich approach of “it won’t happen to me” is a bad strategy.

Having a solid, pretested Business Continuity Management Program in place is smart for any company. A Business Continuity Management Program uses business common-sense and applies prevention, mitigation, and pre-planning to assure that your company can competitively survive any unplanned business disaster…WHEN it comes your way.

The basic components of a solid Business Continuity Management Program:

· IDENTIFYING THE ESSENTIALS: Determine which of the functions/products/services that your company provides are absolutely critical to your clients, your revenue stream, your stakeholders, your regulators, and your continued successful business existence.

· DETERMINE all the internal and external resources and processes that are required to either maintain or restore each of the functions. Determine how soon each must be available.

· PUT A PLAN in place that will maintain or restore your critical functions even after you have lost your facility or lost your IT environment or key staff or key vendors or power or other company-killing disaster scenarios. Where are you recovering to? Have you backed-up what you need? Does your back-up work as planned?

· CREATE A CRISIS COMMUNICATION PLAN. Determine how you will communicate with all the key people after the disaster has struck. “Key people” defined as employees, clients, customers, patients, vendors, media, regulators, stakeholders, etc. It will be important to keep them in the loop as the disaster unfolds.

· IDENTIFY THE RISKS to your location and your organization. Determine and implement how to protect your critical functions through prevention and mitigation.

· REVIEW AND UPDATE. Your Business Continuity Management Program should always reflect the needs of your company. It evolves and changes as the company evolves and grows. Be prudent; keep the program current and useful.

· TEST TO CONFIRM: And finally, test your plans every year. It is your company’s lifeline. Make sure that they will work when you need them.

I invite you to contact me if you have any questions concerning Business Continuity Management Programs.

Jim

Jim Christensen
JCBCM Consulting, Ltd.
Jim@BusinessContinuityMgt.com

815-477-3655 [office]
815-342-0415 [cell]
1460 Parkridge Drive
Crystal Lake, IL 60014-8694
www.BusinessContinuityMgt.com

change management

Several years ago I had a client move from one office building, in Chicago, to another. They moved into a furnished space, however, they decided to purchase new desk chairs for all of the employees. In an attempt to keep all the employees happy my client purchased the same chairs they had previously. We upholstered the chairs in a different fabric to complement their new office and we even upgraded the chairs with a few more ergonomic adjustments. In a nut shell, our intentions were good. After my client moved in, one weekend, I went over to see how the new office was working out. In the middle of walking through the office the facility manager and I were confronted by an woman who was very upset that we had replaced her very comfortable chair with a cheap one. She made us throughly aware that she was unhappy with the way we had wasted the company's money on inferior chairs when we could have easily moved the old ones to the new office. Needless to say, I was in disbelief. So much so that the woman stomped away before I even had the chance to tell her that she was sitting in the same chair.

I used to tell this story to illustrate to customers just how adverse people are to change, however, I recently realized that my job should be more than just preparing clients for change. My job is to help my client's manage for these changes by developing a change management plan. In my opinion the biggest piece of a change management plan is communication. Let your employees know what is going to change in the office; and more importanly, let them know why these changes are taking place. Getting employees to buy into the change is a lot better than them feeling that management is indifferent to them. In addition, give your employees the opportunity for input; or at least allow them to express their opinion. Yes, this may take up a lot of your time up front, but people who are unhappy after the office change are still going to corner you to express their displeasure and then they are more prone to try and drum up fellow employees to support their opinion. So, send out e-mails with updates on the project. Have an office town-hall meeting. Let them see their new space while it's still under construction. Create some enthusiasm for the impending change. The better you communicate with your employees on the front end the more likely you are to minimize their disappoinment on the back end.