Business continuity plan is more about communication during crisis than procedes

A business continuity plan should be viewed as a guide holding key information, not as a procedural manual, said Paul Cleary, general manager at Horn IT Solutions.Cleary spoke as a panel member during the Risk and Insurance Management Society (RIMS) Ontario Chapter’s seminar on emergency management in Toronto on Oct. 13, 2010.”Communication and collaboration are the most important parts of a business continuity plan,” he said. “You know that whatever you wrote down [in your plan] is not necessarily going to be what you end up doing [in the event of a crisis]. So, it comes down to planning roughly what you will need to do, and being able to communicate with one another to adjust the plan during the [crisis].”Cleary pointed to the case of the Chilean miners who were trapped underground for 70 days before the first miner was pulled to the surface on the evening of Oct. 12 – the evening prior to the ORIMS seminar. Initial reports when the Chilean miners were trapped estimated a rescue could not be attempted until Christmas time. “If you look at the Chilean miner rescue that’s happening right now, that’s a really good example of a case where there was no plan, but they came up with a pretty good plan at the time,” he said. “There was something about that organization that made it possible for them to come up with something. It would be interesting to study that and find out what it was. That’s probably just as useful as a really good plan. “You can plan for it [a crisis event]. You can put the tools in place and you can build the team structure and the communication cycles around that [to allow you to be nimble and decisive during the situation.]”