BCP - business as usual
operations
io What'sNewS Issue 6 October 2000
Fuel blockades have brought the country to a standstill, power supplies can no
longer be guaranteed. Environmental protestors are rioting in the city center. OPEC
has called an emergency meeting and the market has never looked so volatile.
You're touching any wood you can find. And then the police ring: there's been a
bomb threat and the building will have
to be evacuated immediately.
High risk
Useful experience
Monitoring change
People power
Expanding services
Value-added
It might sound like Wall Street meets
Towering Inferno, but it's just this sort
of scenario which London's new Business
Continuity Plan (BCP) is designed to
cover. Operational since 1 September, the
BCP (and disaster recovery planning) aiins
to ensure that, come heil or high water, at
Rl it will be 'business as usual'. 'Whatever
the threat, whether act of God or mali-
cious damage, we must be certain we'll
provide reliable services to clients and
minimize exposure,' explains deputy gen-
eral manager, David McWilliam. 'Essen-
tially, the BCP is a plan of action that de
tails what should happen in various
scenarios. It tells us what to do, who is in
charge, how and where to convene the
committee empowered to take the neces-
sary decisions, and what to communicate.'
But fire, flood and other major disasters
are not the only threats to business conti
nuity. As business activities become ever
more interdependent and systems-based,
simpte failures, such as power cuts, carry a
correspondingly higher risk. Therefore, in
addition to its coverage of low-frequency,
high-impact, 'disaster' scenarios, the Lon-
don BCP also ensures that iow-impact,
high-frequency events such as staff ill-
nesses or malfunctioning PCs cause mini
mal disruption. 'It covers all eventualities
from the loss of the entire building to a
single systems failure which requires the
relocation of a department within the
premises,' says McWilliam.
As such the BCP is a significant develop-
rnent in RI's contingency planning: as the
first extending single event coverage, such
as the Y2K-developed Transition Period
Continuity Plan (TPCP), into
BCP asks: 'What are you going to do?'
comprehensive, daily provision. This has
been done in part by leveraging experience
gained in the TPCP, explains project man
ager Denise Shiner. 'We've used the same
four-stage model that was developed in-
house to handle the millennium roll-over.
First we identify the products, then the
critical processes, the dependencies and
the resources - the result is a cascade
model to cover all contingencies.' This ap-
proach also sheds light on the interdepen-
dencies of resources between offices.
Such a comprehensive model draws heav-
ily on the individual businesses' intimate
knowledge of their own products and
processes - end ownership belongs to
them. 'The plan is specific to their busi
ness - they're ultimately responsible for of
fering a continuous product or service,'
says McWilliam. But this doesn't mean
that the development team's responsibili-
ties end with the issue of hard copies of
the plan. As systems and situations change
continually, a committee is being set up to
monitor those changes and generally en
sure that the plan is kept up-to-date.
'Effective ownership is critical to the
BCP's success,' reiterates head of GFM op
erations Marcel Gerritsen. A plan is noth-
ing without the people to implement it.
'Having the BCP on paper or on the in
tranet is useful, but people need to live
and breathe this plan - so it becomes a
natural response.' Consequently opera
tions - a critical area from a BCP perspec-
tive - will be regularly simulating different
discontinuity scenarios throughout the
year. People will be asked: 'This is happen
ing, what are you going to do?'
A well-rehearsed and updated BCP should
ensure reliable services, yet the next chal-
lenge is integration with disaster recovery
and 'crawlback'. 'We know which parts of
the business are most sensitive - but it's
also essential to escalate and restrueture
the relevant data in a disaster recovery
room,' says McWilliam. Here the BCP
team works closely with infrastructure, re
sponsible for managing, resourcing and
coordinating the creation of a disaster re
covery center. Infrastructure's Mick Powell
adds: 'with Y2K our job was to design a
simple site, ensuring that processing and
making payments would continue - BCP
will expand to cater for all critical systems
within the branch.' At the moment the
stand-by site has some 40 dealer positions,
but more (or less) can be installed as re-
quired by individual businesses.
The challenge now is to successfully bal-
ance cost against risk and exposure. Says
McWilliam, 'we didn't want to build a
Rolls Royce when all we needed was a
Landrover.' Despite its branch specific ap-
proach, many elements of the London
plan can be used throughout the network,
particularly in other large exposure offices
such as Utrecht, New York, Hong Kong,
Sydney and Singapore. At the moment
McWilliam is confident he's getting value
for money, though obviously he's not keet
to test its full capabilities.
Check intranet's http:llhcp.rahohank.com
or http://57.198.68. 187 for more Infor
mation on the BCP
