Compass Consulting International, Inc.
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Compass Consulting International, Inc.
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"A Living Disaster Plan Part 6 of the series on Disaster Recovery Planning By Geoffrey C. Tritsch and Dr. Robert Kuhn From last month's article Writing and Selling the Plan you probably realized that preparing a disaster plan wasn't going to be easy. While the process will not be effortless, it is also not impossibly complicated either - just time-consuming. Only under very limited circumstances does having written the plan mean you are done. Think of the disaster plan as the documentation for an ongoing set of processes - the journey, not the destination. Success of disaster response depends on good communication with internal and external constituencies, especially (but not only) ensuring that the emergency personnel (on- and off-campus such as operators, public safety, fire/rescue, police, facilities and technical staff) can all reach and be reached by anyone involved. Don't forget to involve human resources, legal, and public relations in both the planning and the response. The information gathered in the fourth article in this series about priorities, procedures, places, people, "parts", and all their relationships all needs to be kept current. Whatever is in your plan, it must be kept up-to-date to be of any use. You wouldn't expect actors to perform in a play without rehearsal, so you also need to train all those involved to fulfill their roles in response to a disaster. You will need to train operators, staff, public safety personnel, facilities personnel, team leaders, and support personnel. The training should be used to update the planning, and should itself be documented. (Train on the document and document the training.) Like any muscle, a plan that isn't exercised, atrophies. So to avoid the worst embarrassments, your plan will need to be tested regularly. Testing should run the gamut from walking through a hypothetical scenario, to simulations, to (announced or unannounced) live exercises. Testing will reveal flaws in planning and areas requiring additional training.
If your sole reason for developing a disaster plan was to satisfy your external auditors, then your plan can sit on a shelf to be dusted off annually for them. If you want the plan to be useful in an emergency (What a concept!), then it needs to be routinely tested, all participants trained, and everyone needs to be involved in the process. General Eisenhower said "In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." The situation for disaster planning is analogous, and there is more value in the process (planning - training - testing) than there is in the document. So, after six months of these articles, if you're scratching your head about what to do next, consider:
However, it is not so important how you start but that you start, for as Confucius said, "If one does not have long-range considerations, one will surely incur imminent afflictions."
Geoffrey Tritsch, President of Compass Consulting, has been a technology consultant specializing in higher education since 1980. He is a frequent presenter at workshops and conferences and a contributor professional journals. As Senior Consultant with Compass Consulting, Dr. Robert Kuhn focuses on assisting clients with management and planning for information technology. His core competencies extend deep into the fundamentals: systems and applications technologies and complex networking.
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