“If You Fail to Plan, You Are Planning to Fail”
Benjamin Franklin
In January of 2020, my manager asked me to take on the project of updating our Continuity of Operations Plan. It had not been reviewed and/or updated in several years. Always up for the challenge, I accepted and casually embarked on this new mission.
Several weeks into the project, our Service Delivery Director asked me if we should consider the Coronavirus that was gaining attention in the news media. I hadn’t thought much about it yet. At the time, only few cases had been reported which were isolated to the west coast. I thought “do we really need to worry about this?” After all, we were safe here on the east coast. Right?
Project Briefing
What started as a pretty run of the mill endeavor, quickly turned into a mission critical initiative during an emerging and evolving pandemic. A fragmented and stale document was in need of some serious updates to address the immediate crisis we were now facing. The information was available, but was scattered and unorganized. I am proud of our team, who united during a difficult and confusing time to produce a fantastic end product.
Because the project was temporally related to an actual continuity event we were able to simultaneously identify gaps and rapidly implement improvement measures.
Successes
- Coordinating and unifying a group of staff with diverging opinions and priorities
- Updating a complex plan within a limited timeframe
- Synthesizing various resources to add relevancy and value to our existing plan
- Translating highly technical terminology into layman’s language
- Revamping and reorganizing our plan to align with industry standards such as NIST and CISA
LESSONS LEARNED/BEST PRACTICEs
- Keep everybody on track (schedule regular meetings and request timely updates).
- Be consistent. Have the same expectations for all group members. Escalate when necessary if progress is not happening.
- Stay organized, keep a centralized location for all resources and project documentation. Utliize document tracking and check-out features of SharePoint for collaboration and simultaneous editing.
- Keep focused. Project meetings can veer off track unexpectedly. While off-topic discussions can sometimes lead to discovery, they can also be time consuming and wasteful. Keep a continuous improvement register to track new ideas and review periodically.
Emily has done a very good job driving the COOP plan and delivering a quality product. She has been able to take all of the different inputs and create a document that we will be proud to put in front of our client.