Pandemic Portfolio Management

Most large organizations across the globe will have stood up their crisis management teams over the last few weeks. During the same time, thousands of other businesses will have only just been discovering they need one! However, with very few exceptions, all will be finding out that what they face is not something they ever planned for.

Typical business continuity plans cover three phases – Response, Recovery, and Restoration phases. However, if you look at characteristic curves, those phases are based on responses in minutes and hours, recovery in hours and days, and restoration within weeks. The current situation is causing responses to be drawn out to days and weeks, recovery in months, and restoration in quarters or even years. Utility and travel companies are great examples of industries where standing up crisis teams is normal. Still, in almost all their scenarios, the event is something that comes and goes fairly quickly, and rarely spans broad geography.

There is no doubt that businesses, just like governments around the world, failed to see the early signs and start early planning, and indeed during the initial response phases, underestimated the speed and impact of the changes forced upon us. Some would say nobody could have known, but that is wrong. Trawl the internet, and you will find a wealth of information suggesting that this was occurring. Scientists have been warning and modeling the effects and timing of pandemics for years. Some examples being based on SARS and MERS, and others were going back before those. So, from a business planning perspective, we have to accept that we either did not believe them or were just complacent.

With crisis teams operating and general acceptance that what we are seeing will go on for months at least, maybe even for the rest of this year, we need to do more. I suggest that many of the current teams are focused on getting people working from home, dealing with cash flow challenges, and immediate revenue implications. I suggest that this is still not pandemic planning. Should the full force of the pandemic hit us, your business will not be dealing with people working from home, you will be dealing with how to run a business in the face of 40% plus staff sickness,

Ironically, the only parts of our economies that might genuinely be preparing for pandemic impacts in terms of staff shortages are our health services and our government-run operations. So, in going forward, it's time to step up planning, don't confuse dealing with self-isolation with having an unavailable workforce.

I want to suggest this is where pandemic portfolio management comes in. In order to be able to undertake this task, you will need to have captured or quickly start to capture your portfolios of people, processes, projects, and systems. With these captured, you should then do a few things. 

Firstly, for processes and systems, identify 3 or 4 categories e.g., a) Business Critical b) Essential c) Important but not essential and d) Not essential (change the labels as suits your business best) and go through the portfolios assigning the labels. You can then quickly create lists or heatmaps to ensure you stay focused on the things that will matter most.

Secondly, identify a similar suitable set of labels for your people and projects and assign them. It is very likely in the current scenario that you may wish to re-plan your project priorities.  You might delay some on-premise software update/upgrade plans and instead ramp up new projects to enable greater use of the cloud, or better enabling mobile working, etc. For people, you will need to ensure you are cataloging skills and understanding what cross-training should be taking place now so that people can switch roles more easily.

As you reflect on these actions, I wonder how many business leaders will be thinking about what teams they have that can do this work? For others, there will be a dawning realization that they now understand why they needed to have that enterprise architecture in place. Yes, when it comes to this type of slower longer-term business disruption, enterprise architecture really pays off.

In last week's article, I also highlighted the value and importance of using business capability models, and the same is true this week, as you should also map those people, processes, projects, and systems to the associated business capabilities. Although starting now is not ideal, this is not work that has to take months, with the right tool much can be done in days, or very few weeks. There are several newer cloud-based enterprise architecture tools ideally suited to these tasks and will come ready to use with suitable impact analysis dashboards and reports out of the box.

Another aspect of process modeling and analysis that I want to touch on is simulation. For many years simulation was seen as something that tools needed to have, but nobody wanted to pay for and rarely used. In Pandemic Portfolio Management simulations are critical; you have to be able to understand the impact on your processes or across processes of reduced numbers of people. 

Further, I would suggest that as you run those resource simulations and identify failures or risks, then you can turn to technology. It is how you see, for example, resource risks impacting critical processes and driving the need to consider how automation technologies like RPA can be applied.  Where quickly deployable low/no-code applications could be used to reduce resource need or even totally reconfigure processes to adapt to resource changes.

Seeing current news from China, we also can see that we can be in multiple phases at the same time. There may come a time when China is in the restoration phase, while Europe is in the Recovery phase, and the US might still be in the Response phase, so having quick access to information on the impact and changing impacts on your portfolio is crucial.

Reading, as many of you will have done, all the great articles and the not so great over the past couple of weeks, it is very apparent that people are still too focused on the immediate response phase. In some ways, it is understandable, but if you are not using ideas like these, I suggest, ready for the second part of the response, then we’ll have even more problems than we have now. Worse, without this type of planning, then recovery and restoration (read transformation in many cases) will take too long and may be ineffectual.