Something to consider if you value your business is the impact of a disaster. Your considerations should include how a disaster may affect your staff, your operational practices and your site. Obviously we all really hope nothing serious will ever happen to our businesses but in the back of our minds there is always that little voice that fears for the worst.

You should consider the question “How could your business survive a disaster?“

When you start considering this question it is easy to get consumed in what-if scenarios but the best advice is to be practical. A disaster could be anything from a water leakage or a drive failure to a tactical nuclear strike or a freak meteor shower- so you need to be practical and instead focus on the critical operational areas that need to be up and running as soon as possible following a disaster.

There are two areas involved that are slightly different, these a Disaster Recovery which essentially deals with problems post-event and Business Continuity Planning which aims to identify solutions prior to unexpected events. Wiki has a great article on Disaster Recover here and a detailed article on Business Continuity Planning here.

Some considerations are:

Staff Issues

• How would your staff be informed?
• Where would your staff work?
• How would they get there?
• When they get to the temporary area – what do they do?
• How would you account for your staff whereabouts?

Operational Issues

• What essential are needed in case of disaster, e.g. fax machine? e-mail? emergency telephone line? PC?
• Can you get hold of them quickly?
• How many days/hours could you afford to be inoperable?
• What risks are there? e.g. Stock Shortage
• How can risks be mitigated?
• Keep up to date key reports and report summaries off site, e.g. stock level report, bought ledger

Site Issues

• What if certain areas are declared out of bounds?
• Consider an offsite store for keeping backup equipment such as a fax machine, spare PC and letter-headed paper, petty cash, mobile phone, torches and pens/paper.
• Agree a communication order so that people are not tying up essential phone lines calling each other
• Keep back-ups of data off-site

Tips

• Keep spare reams of letter headed paper off site
• Consider an emergency telephone number for staff and customers to contact in case of emergency
• Keep a list of emergency passwords safely stored away
• Have a short document that explains to staff clearly what to do in case of disaster – ensure staff are familiar with it
• Don’t panic – easy said but time is of the essence – leave panicking to others and focus on the tasks at hand.

There are many more considerations and suggestions that could be made here but hopefully I’ve given at least some food for thought on the subject of recovering from that unexpected disaster.