Identifying Lessons: Ending Up Stronger

The process of exercising is complex and time-confusing, no doubt. When it’s finished, you have permission to be exhausted! But you want to get the most of the process, and so in this section we invite you to take a good look again. You may find that you can introduce other aspects to the exercise to suit your own circumstances.

Just a word of caution: don’t skip any of the steps we give you in the preceding sections of this chapter. All the steps are good practice.

Unfortunately, no shortcuts exist to getting this procedure right. If you think you find any, don’t be tempted to take them. Stick to this path and go through each part of the process. Share with your key people and then broadcast your plans across your organisation. Remind your people – at all levels of the business – that they must take testing seriously.

Invite people to contribute to the process, because someone may have a good idea you want to investigate. Even if you find that it may not work, don’t brush the suggestion aside: explain your reasoning and invite further contributions for consideration.

People are your most important asset.

Tackling the de-brief

Ideally, a de-brief takes place immediately following the exercise and before people leave the exercise location (known as a hot de-brief). All that means is that people tell you how the exercise was for them while their memories are fresh. Let them speak in turn and make sure that you get brief notes from everyone before they leave the exercise. You may want to invite them to list, say, three things that for them went well and three that didn’t and get them to record lessons they learnt. You can share these items among players as the dust settles, before memories fade.

You need to follow up the hot de-brief with a measured cold de-brief from the desk. This de-brief allows players to write down more mature comments as they reflect on their actions, experience and interaction with other players. Tell staff they have, say, 48 hours to do this – and make sure that everyone responds.

Learning the lessons and sharing best practice

This stage is really important. What have you and your staff discovered about the way, and how well, your organisation responded to the disruptive event? These issues need your immediate attention. You need to tackle some quicker than others, but address them all promptly before necessity becomes the mother of invention. Have your record-keeper draw up an action checklist to share with staff, which you distribute to key people to complete. Give them deadlines for action and make sure that people meet them.

None of the above, of course, is any good to you unless you then update your procedures and plans to reflect the improvements you need to make. That may sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how easily you can forget that bit. Don’t waste all the effort you’ve put in – you can’t afford it!

The next step is to re-read thoroughly all your procedures, not just those you directly update through your action checklist. Also, have your key people do the same, because one head is never enough and interdependencies are bound to exist between your various procedural documents – a change or improvement in one has a knock-on effect elsewhere. At the very least, an inconsistency between documents can lead to delays, and at worst, to disaster. All the hymn sheets need to carry a joined-up message.

Updating plans

Updating your plan is essential: if following an exercise you’ve identified changes to make or new procedures to introduce, make doing so a priority task. You need to:

Update your plan(s) and amend any written procedures or guidance.

Update all interdependencies.

Ensure that all key staff agree the amendments.

Share each revision with all staff.

Make sure that your master copies are made available to all.

Now, make sure that your next exercise embraces all the changes you’ve made. If the amendments are crucial to recovery, you may want to run a new quick test on how well the new requirements work.

Don’t wait until things go wrong and you need to use your BC plan for the first time!

You may want to record amendments to your plan(s) as version changes and give the date that this happened. In this way, you provide currency to the plans people are holding or working to and have a helpful aid in retrospect if you’re trying to recall progress and so on.

Ensuring good practice

This book is steeped in good practice and we hope that you find it full of sound advice and helpful hints that you can spark on. It’s geared to sharing with you guidance and procedures that have a track record of proven accomplishment by many users; it doesn’t lay claim to being of a ‘formal standard’ and doesn’t need to. Good practice evolves from practical, commonsense applications, and what can be more helpful to a BC exercise scenario?

Ask yourself the following question: if one of your business processes boasts a smart piece of advice or demonstrates a more effective way of doing something – for example, an effective cascade call system or a sharing of expertise or a skill – can your other key business process staff adopt it?

Just imagine how much more a thorough review of your exercise results can add to that stock of proven and valuable experience. You’re bound to uncover evidence of good practice – your good practice. From wherever or whoever within your company it comes, if the exercise helped you, don’t hide it. Share it with everyone in the workforce. This opportunity is the point to hand out pats on the back and, more to the point, reinforce to staff the importance of having a strong BC system built on the things that you all do well – and on everything you’ve achieved together in your exercise.

After sharing, you may be surprised at the results for managing your current system and, what’s more, creating a learning culture geared to maintaining your business in the face of real trouble. (We cover spreading the culture in Chapter 9.)

Using exercise forms

Creating some forms with details of some key points and desired outcomes, which you can share with your key players, is very useful.

The examples in Tables 11-1 and 11-2 provide a simple structure you can use in your first exercise to list key points and desired outcomes. Give these forms to test players to help create added focus and ease of reference. The listed items aren’t exhaustive, but they cover some essentials; of course, you can identify and add other aspects that better suit your organisation. Just take the forms as examples to start you off.

Table 11-1 Suggested Form with Key Exercise Points

Key Points	Comments
Delivery of critical business activity
Delivery via a business process subjected to disruption
Joint working between business processes
Access to current activity data
Availability of key staff
Meeting action deadlines
Supplier and customer contact

Table 11-2 Suggested Desired Outcomes Form

Desired Outcomes	Comments
Effective joint working
Successful delivery of business
Quick and effective access to data and contacts
Full accountability and accurate recording
Readiness for resumption of normal business running.
Identification of good practice and lessons learnt