this is a true story

Please don’t let this happen on your watch. 

Tomorrow is June 1, first day of Hurricane Season which lasts through November 30th.

A while ago (names changed to protect the guilty) a tropical storm was brewing off the coast of a big peninsula state that sticks out into the Atlantic Ocean. It was September. It was a Friday.  It dawned on some of the staff that by Monday, we may have a hurricane and we don’t have a plan. Or a plan that we haven't looked at for a few years, and, most of the staff had turned over since the last time the plan was dusted off anyway.

So a Mandatory Management meeting was called.  3PM.  Friday.   FRIDAY!! 

Managers trickled in. We got started late.  The meeting started by a person reading the latest updates from the NHS. Most of you know the drill anyway – the cone of probability,  the expected intensification, with all the caveats etc. etc. etc.  The team member read on and on and on. Finally someone stopped him – either we were going to get impacted, or, NOT.  Either way, we needed to have a plan. 

Now it was 20 after the hour. Someone said we need to get the employee hotline updated. Uhm, we don’t know the password – that person in HR left a while ago.

Someone was dispatched from the meeting to go and call the terminated employee and ~nicely~ ask for the password so we could update the company message(s).   [ The poor person who got sent had their ego bruised for we all knew in our mandatory management meeting we just identified and then sent the very least important person to do the task. . . ]

We then discussed what should we do about the Call Center and system access.  We have a significant Call Center shop (as in 7AM to 10PM). Someone said we should send home some Call Center staff with laptops, especially the supervisors, so they could log in and make calls from home. Someone else asked how many spare laptops do we have? No one knew. The CTO wandered into the meeting. It was half past the hour. 

The CTO dispatched someone to count the spare laptops.  It was 20.  They would need to be provisioned because either they had old software or no software. How many can we provision in an hour??. The person with that answer was on a smoke break.    Should we start now??   Yes.  But it is Friday at 3:35pm and first shift will be leaving in 55 minutes.  Can we use the thin clients? No – remember we switched them out a couple of years ago and the new ones don’t have the capability to accommodate the new telephony s/w we need….!   . . . oh . . . yeah.... 

What happens over the weekend if we need to react?    (Someone started a sheet and began passing it around for folks to write their names and cell phone number on it)

The COO never showed to the meeting even though the call center reported to him.

We talked about the possibility of sending some people to another ( expected to not be hit) part of the state. What would they bring? Not all the Call Center members had even marginal (let alone stellar) credit scores.  We may need to advance them money. Who authorizes that on Friday ? Finance wasn't invited to the meeting. Who would go – some have kids and spouses and may want to stay back and take care of them.    We didn’t know.   After talking about this for a while we simply drifted off to other brainstorming ideas.

It was now 4PM.      The result?   

We secured the password for the phone, and we would have another meeting on Saturday.

DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU

Wherever you are, North, South, East, West, Middle, hurricane, ice storm, tornado, flood, earthquake, or blackout,or wildfire…..

HAVE A BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN.  

Test it annually, make corrections, and test it again a few weeks later.

Make sure it works and then put it on the shelf to use when you need it.  Thereafter test it twice a year.

Hope is not a strategy.   

Don’t have your customers explaining to you what you ~should~ have done – it does little for customer confidence, or eventually, the bottom line.

This is but one of my entries from my AMAZING STORIES folder.