Project Background
The Client (a global telecommunications company) was experiencing rapid growth internally as well as through acquisitions. Business Units throughout the world worked with a combination of policies and services from the U.S. headquarters as well as local shared services and individual Profit/Loss accountability. This environment coupled with global integration of processes and systems and unique local business, cultural and legal requirements resulted in an extremely complex organization.
Problem Summary
As the complexity of the organization increased, so did the vulnerability of its processes and systems. The sources of vulnerability were both internal and external and much of it was out of the organizations control. Their immediate focus was on how they could react to potential events to best protect their customers, employees and the company’s financial viability.
TBI’s Approach
Through a series of interviews and document reviews, TBI identified the critical organizational components that would form the basis of the Business Continuity Plan. Because the Client’s Subject Matter Experts (SME) were critical to the project’s success, TBI assisted the Client in establishing a multi-tiered structure to plan and implement the Business Continuity project worldwide. TBI then facilitated the identification and prioritization of mission critical processes for both shared services and those unique to different segments of the organization. TBI provided training classes for the Client teams (worldwide) in the use of TBI’s standard process decomposition, business impact analysis and risk analysis methodologies. Using these methodologies, the teams identified the activities that supported the mission critical processes along with their critical inputs and outputs, dependencies and potential risk scenarios (both internal and external). Based on this research, solutions were proposed, validated and
documented to create both corporate and individual business unit continuity plans. These action plans included preventative measures, transition activities, emergency responses and resumption procedures. Throughout the process TBI facilitated, tracked and reviewed the creation and testing of the plans. TBI also led the Client’s teams in ensuring that individual plans for Business Units and shared services were coordinated.
Successful Business Solutions
The project resulted in a series of documented plans that described specific actions to be taken based on the occurrence of loss of functions in identified areas of vulnerability. This provided the Client with solutions for loss of critical functions regardless of the cause. All of the plans were cross referenced with an organization put in place to monitor them and ensure that they remained current. Periodic testing and follow up was also put into place.
Follow-up & Final Outcome
As a result of the process identification and decomposition that was the basis of the Business Continuity Plan, a Process Improvement initiative was started to streamline processes and, in some cases, eliminate those that were shown to have little or no value added.
