Case Study - Utilities
A large utility company in the UK had undergone a wide ranging business process re-engineering and organisational design change programme which had resulted in complete re-design of business processes, procedures, roles, IT applications and culture. It also included a large emphasis on 'Just in Time' supply chain improvement procedures, workforce multi-skilling and the rationalisation of depots and offices. This last part of the initiative facilitated the relocation of a number of outlying depots and offices and the centralisation of many service teams of planners, engineers and other resources. Additionally, a large state of the art control centre was build to enable critical plant data to be collected by advanced telemetry and plant based data acquisition systems. The resultant information was continually monitored and controlled by powerful highly fault tolerant IT systems manned by highly trained staff and support personnel.
The process resilience aspects of the organisation where very well covered by detailed HAZOP studies and other approaches to the high level availability of high quality water and wastewater services.
From a business continuity viewpoint the company's continuity plans were virtually nonexistent and were in need of development hence, a program of work was instigated with the primary objectives to design and develop a BCM solution that would be effective, repeatable and cost efficient.
The BCM program following the classic lifecycle and was targeted at every directorate within the business. Working groups were set up reporting to a high level steering group. Each working group included a BCM expert whose role was to ensure that the solution produced complied with the both national best practice and the company's standard approach to BCM.
The BCM Programme was endorsed at executive level and a budget allocation set aside to fund the various projects which made up the program. Business Impact Analysis exercises were undertaken at departmental level and integrated in to a Directorate level BIA. Risk Assessments were performed on a wide range of potential threats to the organisation by considering strategic, operational and external sources of Risk. The analysis revealed that several areas existed where resilience had to be improved by the creation of risk reduction projects. Further work was initiated to develop integrated continuity planning responses in the form of detailed plans which could be invoked in the event of a disaster impacting on the business.
Typical areas covered by the projects included improving telecommunications back-up in the event of a major failure of the communications infrastructure. Providing alternative electrical power supplies and agreeing workspace fallback provision across the company's sites. Further investigatory work was performed by analysing the recovery time and point objectives for all IT applications across the business. In order to ensure that the BCM development model was followed, BCM training was provided for all members of staff and seminars organised for the BCM teams which included providing real life experience sessions from organisations which had been exposed to business disaster events. Testing presented some very challenging situation to the business particularly in the area of IT infrastructure and applications.
The BCM Methodology was underpinned by designing and developing processes and procedures which were documented in a structured manner. A further initiative which developed naturally from the BCM approach was the design and development of a strategic document management including an audit of all documentation produced and its storage, access and retention policy. The BCM programme was a great success as it enabled a journey to be made from having a very low level of BCM resilience to the creation of a robust defence mechanism adequately suited to a flexible and developing organisation serving many millions of domestic and commercial customers.
Spring Digital