Webinar: Why Business Continuity Plans Fail & How To Avoid Repeating Others' Mistakes
okay i think we will get started i want to uh welcome everyone to today's webinar broadcast wherever you are whatever time it is we really appreciate you being with us today as you can tell the conference discussion is why businesses business continuity plans fail i i think that's a statement we can all agree with at one time or another um so this will be a uh webinar discussion we hope you'll be taking away some useful insights and and guidance and ideas that you can bring back to your own organization i want to welcome our special guest uh speakers today we have carol delate she is uh the senior business continuity manager at exeter finance she's been in the business resilience industry since 1997 so obviously had some first-hand experience with y2k and was introduced to disaster recovery at that time and later became a certified business continuity professional and also became an active member of the association of continuity professionals also online in from boston is stephen clancy he's the senior director contingent workforce strategies knowledge and research at siaa he's primarily responsible for developing and supporting best practice advisory and market research for staffing industry analysts contingent workforce strategies cws as a cwu strategies and research director he works closely with buyers who are engaging msp vms rpo and ats solutions and services to support the organizations and finally ma mark connard he's the senior director of revenue and management and r plus l carriers he has over 40 years of experience in the ltl industry and starting his career earlier in conoco's management training program than spending approximately 14 years with yellow freight and then the next 14 years with usf and currently with our plus l carrier since 2009 so i want to uh welcome our our great speakers we really appreciate your time today um also for those on the line uh we would love to have your questions it's pretty simple uh you could type in your question and just hit the uh the horizontal orange button there somehow that reminds me of the ncaa march madness don't tell me why but maybe because my brackets uh the arrow's pointing down my bracket's not doing too well but anyway i appreciate you all being here if you have any questions we're going to work those into the dialogue in a little bit i thought uh you know we've all been through quite an interesting uh 12 months to say the least so i thought it'd be a good place to start talking about business continuity is uh just uh maybe mark maybe help us kick off here and uh in a nutshell what do you think from a vcp perspective at a very high level you know you've obviously been around a little bit what do you think the last year has taught you um what i gained out of this is that i think we use our experience and we plan contingencies based on what we've become familiar with what we know what i've learned is there has to be much greater imagination in the future i mean who could have conceived that a virus would have brought down the world economy the way it did so uh we in my from my perspective our imaginations need to be stretched um all contingencies exist out there viruses uh nation state politics uh not just the weather hurricanes uh fires plants going down internet going out um it's just it's a whole different thinking but uh in my mind got it okay that's a great point and uh carol do you believe that delivering on the requirement requirements of bcp is more of a priority now do you hear your colleagues and senior executives thinking in a different way relative to bcp oh absolutely sir it has really opened the eyes of a lot of people that uh business continuity is a must for uh for businesses and if they had not heard of business continuity before they certainly did in the past year because of the effects they've had on them uh before this past year i'd say i work in business continuing you say well what's that now i can just say you know this pandemic this is what causes business continuity we still have to continue the business and what do you do to prepare for that so do i think that that means that we are have a we have a higher disability for sure um the priority is being funded a lot more by most companies that i've been in touch with uh over the past year it's really gotten a lot more people we have a lot of job openings and looking for people to help out because uh it's going to be something that's going to be a higher priority going forward uh unfortunate unfortunate that has to be reactive that way but sometimes that's that's what happens with budget you know it's not until you oh yeah i guess we need that now so there it goes thank you okay great point great point and over to you stephen uh i know one of the things we'll get into a bit more deeply today is the contingent workforce but uh just just to kind of give some ideas uh to sprinkle some ideas in in the uh minds of our visitors today why is it so important we spend time and energy on the contingent workforce well i think past bcp plans have focused on and we have this brought up in our preliminary discussions focus on an asset focus on a building what we have to begin to incorporate is the actual uh talent structure that we have you're starting to see organizations that 50 of their total workforce are contingent workers which is amazing to many people when they first hear that statement so the question is do you know of those active contingent workers where they are the other thing is the restructuring of the workplace itself now what percentage is remote where are they located um and then how do you then execute a bcp plan that's not just focused on that particular building incidentally there will be tens planning still um important to create for that but now you have a different um distributed and contingent workforce that you have to take into account and just basic communication with that talent so you can execute your plan if you don't know where they are then how do you and how to reach them then how do you execute your plan that's just basic fundamentals now so just as a follow-up to that the the the fundamental structure of the way organizations are built seems to be in a you know an uh a huge sea change one that again we didn't necessarily know was coming uh even in the last week you had uh you know the new york uh new york times declaring that new york city will never be the same that we will never see the same numbers of people working in those offices and you know the wall street journal contradicted that a few days later but i guess what i'm getting at is it seems like companies are in such a state of flux uh even with their own people and then couple that with the contingent workforce it seems to me there's a lot going on in the minds of these senior leaders and these companies with the workforce and management is it potentially an overlooked issue this this contingent workforce given all these other priorities well i think so because uh you know our experience was that stephen was mentioning um you know we do a quite a bit of business outsourcing with valued collaborative partners and we had connections we had facilities but then suddenly to steven's point we had to communicate with the management teams of those bpo asset management groups to get in touch with their teams uh where are you going to work from can you work from where you're at because all of a sudden much of our work was done in india and as a nation state they shut down travel and you had to harbor it home so our partners had to reach their people and say how do we get them up and get connected to support the contractual obligations they had to our company and just the same we had to do the same work at rnl carriers within the states our people couldn't come to work and we had to start distancing people from one another just to maintain the continuity of our business so we didn't have a rampant exposure to the virus and lose multiple assets all at once so i think stephen's right on with um his comments he was making the points he was setting for so that was our concern challenges okay all right uh well let's go into one of uh more of our scripted uh some of these scripted questions so uh for for folks uh today do you incorporate performance sustainability elements in your bcp in terms of scalability uh up or down that's that's just open anybody who wants to jump in my sense is that you're going to have probably more uh waves that you're going to experience in the general economy and you're going to have some ups and downs that potentially from a performance standpoint even though bcp is is on maybe everybody focuses on disasters and i don't know carol in your experience whether you begin to bring that into the scalability i mean i'm thinking about sustainability you hit a level of performance you have a certain sustainability that you want to make sure that you can keep that performance no matter what's happening in the marketplace and that means how well can you scale up how well can you scale down incidentally contingent work isn't the answer to everybody's business problems okay but you can that can bring some scalability um around those um performance challenges that are caused by big sustainability uh events i don't know what you see in some of your bcp planning uh carol well um as far as that goes to sustainability we can we've always had a percentage like we could good faster so you always plan on being segregated about 30 of what you were having before so you should be able to operate at 70 of what you had uh and in this case with the pandemic it really came down to more like 50 or 40 percent instead of 70 so it was quite a much bigger hit this time in most cases that i saw and heard about so it was that it hit a lot harder than anyone anticipated so uh that did cause a lot of our concern around okay our practical experience at rnl was you know that um in terms of this the sustainability of it you know suddenly we had a mass cataclysmic change usually our scalability we're always thinking about growth and working with our contingent partners to ensure that they scale up as we anticipate growth and need uh never have we been in a situation where suddenly within a 72-hour period we lost 90 of our capacity um and i i i wish i had the answer because if i had the answer i wouldn't be on this i'd be with my own startup telling everybody how to do this but i i i am still baffled and boggles my mind we spent a lot of time talking about if we encountered this situation again when you lose that much capacity how do you sustain your performance we were able to do some things with internal assets deviate and take them off of other duties to perform the things we needed to do our operations and revenue planning to sustain our business but i still don't have the answer and maybe one of our listeners may have the answer and share with us how to do it so yeah folks who uh you don't necessarily have to pose a question you could make a comment as well per mark's point there mark one thing about what you just said i find when you really ponder it does is part of the clue or part of the puzzle relate in some way to the internet strength in a given geography as well as the readiness of an individual to work from home uh when you talk about 90 going out i don't know if every part of the world reacts to that level if you see what i'm saying well no it's a perfect point because this is what we experienced practically is that you know um we we had uh planning and continuity plans to ensure you know duplication and backup of internet connectivity that we had different plants and facilities to see people the real issue became when you couldn't go to those physical work environments to do work and then everyone had to work distributed you know just like in the united states many of the foreign countries there's different levels of access to high quality internet connectivity and so that's what they experienced a lot in india a lot of their people could work in uh businesses and centers that they had good connectivity but once they moved to uh work from home um you didn't have cable connections you had to rely on cellular hotspot connections and some of that was spotty we even see some of that uh here in these states uh where some people are in metro areas and some people work rurally they just don't have the same level of services and so that's that's a key point that um we started to think about and came up with ideas on how we can support uh those assets of ours who don't have great internet service which uh if you haven't seen i was like plumbing you turn the water on you expect the water to work but some places you don't have any water pressure someplace you don't have good internet but we're so dependent on that now i mean to add to that whose responsibility is it is the responsibility of the worker to you know be able to find a starbucks or somewhere where they can plug in with recent uh connectivity or is the responsibility of the business owner to provide the connectivity necessary for them to do their work offer a comet i don't know in the company but uh they didn't grow this company to the size and profitability it did by saying well you guys are on your own i believe at this particular enterprise we see it as our responsibility to ensure that our assets contribute to their maximum capacity and that it's not your job to go find a starbucks guarantee if you don't get good internet access you're probably not living very close to a starbucks anyway or mcdonald's or wherever you go that's true that's true well let's go on yeah excuse me let's go on to the next question and that would be you know this is really the moment to to share and what because everyone was in this boat in some way or another but what was missing from your bcp plan that should have been included and what impact uh this had on the pandemic response phase who would like to take that one first carol i'll take that one sir so in my experience pandemic has already always been a separate document a separate document that was that was created by the crisis management team and was outside of the bcp plan altogether and uh and so that's right in itself uh is an issue because no one hardly ever took the time to exercise or test the pandemic response phase no one ever did that because nobody thought that it would take the people out of the workplace they thought people would die that they would have a lot of people dying off but they never thought that oh they're all going to live or most of them will live they just need someplace else to work so there was a whole mindset a paradigm shift of what that pandemic the effect of that would be because there's not a single pandemic plan that i've ever seen that actually took it from the from the point where it happened this time where it was always an epidemic that everyone was dying and the effects it would have on an office place that you need continued workers you need somebody to do work instead of people that aren't there but it was never the point of oh my gosh you know these people can't come to the workplace they've got to go work somewhere else and they have to welcome close resistance and all these other parameters uh but i think what another thing that was missing from the bc plan that i was i wasn't extra financed that was just a different company so we can't we can't uh slam extra i wouldn't do that but with the company that was worth at the time uh they really had a very small uh section on supply chain and third parties and i think that that really needed to be uh much more in the forefront because the company i was with at the time say a manufacturing firm we saw the workers to do the work but we couldn't get the supplies so we still couldn't do the work and so their frustration from there but no one no one thought that was going to be that it was going to be this far-reaching globally a true globalist so that uh but that's something that is hardly ever as we always you know do the hurricane or the tornado or the um you know a virus gets through the the computer not to the people because through the equipment you know things like that you get other types of losses but not a lot such as this that it's a people lost but it's really a workplace loss and so it shifted right in the stream pretty much right from the beginning and that was definitely not really seen in dc frames that i've seen over the years uh and that's that really caused an upset however people because they had exercisers this is something that we planned everybody knew to jump from there they knew how to take a quantum leap and be able to figure it out uh those that just left the plans on the shelf or you know didn't ever take them out except that one time a year for the tabletop test they they had the ones who really suffered because they really didn't take the concept seriously interesting good points what do you guys stephen what do you think um i i only can add a little bit to really the excellent response that carol has given there and really framing maybe what wasn't in the response for a pandemic and losing the workplace um just an example we know that there was a number of folks um a year ago this month they were sending people home with desktops because you think about all all the different components and and the other thing that that i don't and i think there's a lot of risk that was taken is there was no real data security plan now all of a sudden the data is flowing from a remote spot um and either using a vpn um what i mean because you're in house with the internet now you're dealing potentially if you're going to vpn yeah you're in the internet but if not then now all of a sudden you're really exposed uh with data security and so is that part of the plan because this is a new operating environment that you're you're working on i'm sure that they scrambled and got some procedures in there but that's that wasn't potentially in the bcp plan before because as carol said nobody really and i think this is an important point nobody really said okay let's shut down a building and see what happens okay test it test it um do we have this technology in continued workforce business called the vendor management system the vms and everybody pretty much has one in the bigger firms um that piece of software and so when we talk about sustainability of the contingent workforce program that manages all this um activity with computerworks we say well how good is your bcp plan well i'm not sure i said why don't you turn off the vms and see what happens okay so anyways testing and also i would add data security i agree what about you mark well at that point i would just add guys and gals that run an imt technology group you know had the vision we had we're we're a vpn outside connectivity so we had that covered however we hadn't done a good job of saying does everybody have the equipment because so many of these applications that run our processes are proprietary and we haven't loaded it on someone's personal computer so we were doing exactly what stephen said i remember taking my suit off putting jeans on because we were unhooking the pcs monitors keyboards mice and putting them on carts and putting them in the back of trunks for people to take home and giving them printed instructions on how to access the vpn to restart at the house because we were having to start with the office so uh we did not have that in our contingency plan so um we certainly think about it now we did buying a lot of uh these mini tower lead me i don't know you guys figure it out you know we stocked up that stuff and uh we're right we can work from anywhere now so let's learn do you do you all think the companies that were they're from their very foundation they they were distributed they pushed for remote they built their companies with the concept of we we can manage people from wherever they are uh you know ibm comes to mind to a degree but there's lots of other companies in the new economy who really lean heavily on the idea that we can be more agile if we're more remote is it is it logical to think that those companies are going to be better prepared for the kind of things we went through and and obviously maybe some of the nuts and bolts of keeping the business running but is it too much of an assumption to think that their bcp would have been stronger or more resilient in a situation like we went through i i think by default um with this particular um event in pandemic they were able to leverage uh take a company like toptail okay it's an online talent platform they're completely uh remote they like what rei did uh they had a beautiful headquarters in oregon and and i don't know three or four months ago they sold it off and they went completely virtual completely remote except for their retail outlets and who knows if most of that ends up going remote because people are buying stuff online it's just it's a transition of the core um workplace fundamentals and and so when you start taking off the issues um um you know top tell i don't think they have email they use slack i mean you use ms teams you attach document storage security and also collaboration because you're all someplace else you're not physically together and it can add to the security but it can add to be able to execute remotely so if you just change your communication strategy your interact strategy um and but that they were they were they they were ready for it and i would just say one last thing in that i've been working out of uh remotely uh for a couple of different businesses for the last 20 plus years this didn't affect me as far as what i was doing on a daily basis i had to mask up and do other kinds of things but i just kept operating what do you think carol do you think the advantage went to companies that were already adept at managing remote teams and working with remote partners uh yes i do think they have an advantage up front but i think that that most of the rest of us came up to speed rather quickly uh especially if you had at least some capability prior you know like like stephen was saying he worked remote for a long time i worked remote at least you know one or two days a week so i was already kind of used to either in the office or at home but there's a lot a lot of workers that weren't that way that you know just couldn't do that but um a lot of call centers had already gone distributed you know you didn't know if you were calling state farms at three in the morning and talking to someone in their pajamas or not you know if you just didn't know because it didn't really matter what time zone you were in if that makes sense so if there's a lot that had already done those kinds of things where it made sense uh but there's others where it just really depends on the industry quite frankly if you have a company that you need people there to do what needs to be done assemblies and things like that that are not 100 automated uh or need to need inspections at certain times and you can't necessarily inspect unless you actually look at it and touch it move it and see if it works did you have any uh points on that one mark well yeah we're in a trucking business so we're in the dirty world business we're not we're not new technology you know it started with a little wagon now we got tractors and trailers but you know there may have been some first mover advantages some people like ibm these tech services and consulting but you know we quickly learned and as we learned that uh that became a new opportunity for us to reduce costs but more so i think we've learned that people working from home valued that experience and we're starting to see that applying more effort to ensure that they can stay at home and uh we've seen activity go up we've seen turnover go down in certain aspects of our business i just you know just think of you know caretakers at home who have to look at children or have a plumber come in they used to have to take a half a day of vacation to go take care of those things they don't do that anymore and they stay connected working they've been trained they're very effective and efficient so what advantage is some others had obviously they had them i i think we have quickly uh caught up with that and we are realizing the benefits and advantages of that and now that's another lesson from this you know had this not occurred we may not have thought in those terms we're still thinking in our whole world terms you know so um i'm sitting in a brand new office building that doubled the size of our space three years ago and it was nearly 100 occupied i'm i got a whole floor i could pick a conference room to come in which i did so i'm not sure how many people are coming back but not many there's not going to be a lot of people coming back but we're better for it probably sure well let's uh let's uh first of all uh for everyone on the line if you have any questions or comments i want to encourage you to go ahead and uh and file those with us and hit the orange arrow button and then i want to move on to a bit more practical discussion you know we really want to help our listeners today on the construction and contents of their core bcp plan so and and uh maybe we'll start with you carol is your vcp and all hazards approach or does it have appendices for identified risks and vulnerabilities uh not the one i'm currently working with in exeter finance but i have been at a couple of companies where they did do an all hazards approach but i don't necessarily recommend it as much just because uh even even whether it's not it's not the same approach you don't you you know you don't exit the building if it's a tornado if you do at this building it's the fire so how could that be all happens you can't tell them well what do you do you're saying or do you know you have to kind of just know so from that standpoint and that's just a very simplistic uh example but uh but the point being is that uh you can have a core plan and then have appendices for all the different types of risk and threats and vulnerabilities that affect the company so uh it's fine to have one like i said a core plan and i have a lot of a lot of different tendencies that you can just branch off of um this busy where also uh if you have a commercial off the shelf a cost kind of plan that that would uh actually uh lean in towards having a core plan that you know put your components together based upon what your application or your department's needs are okay other thoughts from uh stephen and mark we we do a um so we're focused on the contingent workforce program that sits inside you know organizations and they can be focused on north america or global uh in nature and so what what we do is and it's probably the bcp is part of this sustainability uh approach we have and there's different kinds of risk that we look at um some of these are are you know legal risk some of them are operational risk uh some of them are strategic um which is brand you know this kind of thing um so uh but the only thing uh and i think carol's hit the mark if this can can get so big it's it's not focused and so it's not usable it's not effective it's not practical um but what we've been telling our our clients in our council is that here's your risk categories complete a risk assessment so it can inform you of some specifics you want to make sure it's covered in your bcp and so that's probably how i can position what we talk about it starts with sustainability what are the things you need to have and then drive that into some of the bcp operation plans to go execute when certain things happen okay anything to add mark i mean all hat all hazards what are all the hazards i mean who knows i mean a year ago i didn't think virus was a hazard but um i mean i i go back to a comment i made earlier is you know you i think we've i've learned you've got to think with more imagination not just depend on looking at what i already know but you know getting the crayons and the paper out and start drawing pictures and coming up with something creative what is it that i don't know that i can imagine may happen but then the stephen's point is we still got to be focused you can get so off the edges on this thing i don't know um where it could lead you have to stay focused on the business of the day but you know good leaders are looking over the horizon to say what may happen and i just think imaginations i need to stretch mine i can talk about me so that's one of the things i have to do for my company is be a little bit more imaginative so this is an i don't think sorry go ahead kirk i was just going to say um you know carol have you seen where people have over invested in bcp plans um no no i don't think so okay all right okay i have kind of a question along that same line for mark so in these situations of and i i think you're absolutely right you have to be more imaginative don't don't be too uh narrow in your thinking but i have seen situations uh sometimes in the technology industry in terms of spending that uh even like risk management the famous line of don't do something that'll put you on the front page of the wall street journal so the the c-suite is always trying to figure out what are we gonna make sure this is gonna make absolutely sure we're not the poster child for screwing up bcp we want to use our imagination but again it it kind of boils down to budget sometimes and i'm just wondering maybe it's not over investment but our company is more vulnerable to fixating on bcp or trying to reduce all this risk when you're trying to balance what's what's possible and what's not possible and trying to try to put metrics behind that that's a question to me yeah i mean that was supposed to be a question it's trying to find that balance point because um you know some of the panelists gain money by us contracting with them to help us with these things which i i can appreciate but then uh when you're a privately held company and you pretty much uh report the performance of the company up to a very small family you've got some responsibility to get good advice and counsel um so i i i probably i think you can overspend i mean you got to balance what's in the budget to what's doable assess it against the risk but in fairness you know you need to be open to learning things that you simply have not been exposed to in the past at least taking it in putting the cards on the table and then trying to make good decisions between the men and women that are leading the organization uh um i don't think there's any simple answer but uh that's what we to get to a certain level of management that's your job is to think yeah very true okay well why don't we move on to the next question um is a bcp plan more prone to fail when not aligned with the clauses of iso 22 301 and uh you know this kind of moves in the direction of uh weather staying aligned with international standards or whether or not to adopt them so any thoughts on that all right i have thoughts on that a bcp document should align with the causes of iso 22-301 whether or not you implement the iso 22301 and pay for the standard and up and keep it updated that's a different story and that can be a budgetary thing it also can depend upon the size of the company but at the end of the day what uh iso 22301 which is the standard for business continuity came out in 2012 uh it actually takes the core of business continuity planning and expanded it into the ten clauses that you usually see in the knights of standards usually but it's structured very very much the same every iso uh standard out there is and at the end of the day the plan do check act which is the core of this continuity is uh to have a cyclical uh ongoing plan you plan you do which is exercise you check and make sure what works but didn't work and you act upon it and make an improvement and you do that over and over again usually on an annual basis the uh 22-301 took that concept and made it into an international standard so i do believe that every bc plan should follow that same uh thought process of the plan dude check act uh whether or not you you apply it and by the standard that will make you that the reason you would buy the standard is that it's a marketing differentiator for one thing that you have a company that you know that is is aligned with an international standard uh some companies that that is never going to matter but still the concept arizona 2301 needs to be applied because it goes right back to the core of friendly checkout okay all right so in other words it it's important to keep it aligned uh uh mark or steven any thoughts on that i'm thinking um i'd like to hear maybe from mark i need to become a student of exactly what it is we're primarily a domestic business we don't get too fully involved in that type of certification yeah yeah i you know i i think also um you know iso standards are very critical i mean they it takes a while for them to be developed it developed from a very diverse group across the world uh and and so i think there's something to be learned from those um the thing that um um i wanted to just add is you should also have your own internal measurement that when you put in these bcp plans and policies you should also look to see how it impacts your ability to sustain your competitive advantage in the marketplace you don't want to get so restrictive and probably is not the case maybe with the bcp plan but beyond that where people get so they overreact for what we went through i don't blame people for overreacting but then what you have to do is you're going to measure this against your competitive performance in the marketplace and make sure you don't start throwing in some restrictive policies that don't allow you to um compete as well as you can so you've got to have mark said you've got to have a good balance approach we talked about over investor at least i mentioned it i'm just suggesting that we have to make sure that um we don't um you know go so far over that all of a sudden you know we're restricting our ability to conduct the business that we need to and in the way we need to it's a tough balance it's not a perfect answer this is a standard can give you some guidance but then you have to you know decide this is the kind of position we need to be to be able to plan for the future if something happens okay perfect and we have another kind of more of a nuts and bolts question so i'm gonna i think carol you probably the best one to take this one is uh do you use the ms suite of tools to create bc documents or do you use a cots product and you know what are the pros and cons of using prepackaged software to manage bc programs in your opinion okay so most um more companies than not use the ms readers tools to create their bc documents they use the uh the uh you know the basics the excel and and word and powerpoint and they put it all together and it works perfectly fine but it has a tendency to allow for people to go rogue uh so if you're a company that that is uh heavily audited or heavily regulated i would highly recommend that they use a commercial off-the-shelf crts muscle on the shelf off the shelf uh products one that is already packaged to uh to address that so there are uh certain certain brands that are more suited towards the financial services there are some that are more suited towards manufacturing services there are some that are just generic out there but it's really i think it's really important depending upon what uh what you see down the road if you're a private company and you can just you know throw it together and and be done with it but you could be a private company it doesn't really understand business primarily and you want to have some structure to start with and i think that's a great idea is to to buy into a product that that already exists and you just kind of put your data in and then it creates the product for you and that definitely makes it easier to maintain so in the long run i think it's better to have a product unless it doesn't fit your company okay very good very good and i'd like to go back to more of a higher level question uh for uh our panelists today is what is the single greatest insight gained from managing bcp through the pandemic uh i know we've kind of touched on this before but you if you were really forced to try to uh crystallize the the biggest insight what would it be all the way in quickly it's it's the value of our people the value of assets i mean two i think uh we've focused too much on data connectivity physical plant uh disaster recovery in terms of the physical and not the people and it became very very apparent to us probably a wake-up call many people came to is that just how important each one of us is and the people that we work with that's that's the clarity that i gained in this thing i'm going to steal marx i do because it's resonating in my mind and that is bring a new imagination to how the business uh can operate moving forward uh and not keep be trapped by well this is the way we do it this is the infrastructure we have because i think it'll allow you to have more effective vcp plans in place but also might completely help you transform the way the business operates because guess what in a lot of industries the business has been able to operate not only more effectively but in many cases including ours more profitably i mean i'll give you an example so we run this ccwp certification program and we've been doing it virtually over zoom um we do amazing when we commit a natural lax with zoo i mean it's just wonderful what we're able to do um as far as polls activities myth and realities all kinds of things in an educational knowledge transfer uh product but guess what i'm not traveling i'm not paying for food i'm not i mean there's just all these expense because everything was done in person before and now using mark's um council i have to bring a new imagination of how i'm going to execute that program moving forward um to make it more effective and um increase the return on investment for us being involved in a certification in the industry absolutely i i'd like to ask that i agree with everything you said steven but i think at times the personal effect is really good too you know when i i don't want to be 100 removed 100 of the time from people i work with it's nice once in a while have that you know there's only so much team building and exo and you can do virtually you know so you know what i'm saying and there's a lot to be said for that so you can only get so much to resume i know some companies right now are doing zoom free fridays just to not have so much in your face that's right yes so yeah so there's i think a hybrid is is what's going to happen because i understand a lot of companies are allowing the individual employees for the most part to be able to choose whether they how many days a week they come in or you know if they come in 100 or you know never at all uh that kind of thing but um which i think is great because some people do much better working from remote uh they they do get more done uh i'm one of those i'm much more effective uh just not being distracted by all my co-workers coming over to say hello show me their grandchildren's pictures you know which i love but uh at the end of the day you know it can be very distracting so nice once in a while though that's a really important point we actually have some in-person classes scheduled for the later half of the year so we're going to have it's going to have to be a balance it depends on what kind of value you're bringing to the marketplace what's the business you're in and then um but i think it's going to have um your your your word hybrid um um uh it's going to have that mix um and you got to figure out what the what the right balance is for the business you're in yeah okay we got two more questions questions to knock out again if anybody out there has any other thoughts or comments please don't hesitate and put them through uh again for a panelist do you conduct an annual risk assessment that reviews strategic operational safeguarding resources and compliance that can inform the details of your bcp focus so this is something that we um bring to our folks we do program maturity assessments to again focused on the contingent workforce program and what we're saying is because there's all different kinds of risk in these particular areas when you're using a contingent worker and and what we're trying to do is we're trying to assess will it actually happen um and if it does what's the impact um not all that is going to be you know a place in a bcp plan but it can inform the details um and we have i've built um this little excel based tool to help people do that um as far as our our council members are are concerned but we try to look at all these different kinds of things and it's based on trying to sustain um sustainability but there's a lot of risk involved with using a contingent worker and so we try to get people to look at all these different kinds of aspects but then we said with all that rich information you know can you um put you know additional detail in your bcp not all of it but where it makes sense okay anything to add mark or carol well yeah i was just going to say yes we do conduct annual risk assessments and i don't often have to change a lot because not risks don't often change year to year and and you can do a casual just passover of oh yeah these are all the same kind of things but um you know every couple of years it's better to dive a little deeper and expose some things like steven was talking about yeah so we do annual but i think what we've learned is back to the theme you know i think we're gonna have to look a little deeper into the woods for the wolves that are lurking out there that uh our imagination here to do forward and envision so uh um opportunity for learning growth okay sometimes it takes a little yeah sometimes takes a little bit to get this thing established if you haven't been doing it on a formal basis but to carol's point after you get it established then you know your business is not going to change so much that the risk assessment is going to change um a lot what we also try to do uh carol is we try to do a two by two and basically put dots on where people fall in certain kinds of risk levels and now there's our risk profile standing in front of us physically and how do you want to manipulate that to move that because the other balance is don't move every if everything is all done by the bottom you know left quadrant then i'm not too sure how you're operating as a business because you're so locked down who wants to do business with you and then there's a balance on the other end where oh you're pretty risky in the way that you're operating you're probably being sued left and right so you know so there's different and that just can you know deeply inform you and and and having a strategic conversation about that once you do all that detailed work um it can then allow you to almost bcp is your execution uh plans when stuff happens so so i'd just like to close it out with with just a comment from each of you uh where relative this conversation where do you think we will be in a year like two to three years down the road you know i i i think about the issue of of uh data privacy and breaches and hackers and i remember 10 15 years ago suddenly there was a much greater understanding of wow this is stuff we can't mess around with we've got to be locked down we've got to understand what fishing is we have to understand how to protect corporate assets and there was definitely a consciousness raising process is that where we'll be with bcp do you think there's going to be a much more active dialogue relative to strategy and things or is that overplaying it you know again two to three years down the road i i i was just gonna say i think that um bc is now going to be a well known term in business and well-versed and we've looked into whereas in the past it didn't have nearly as much visibility so i'm glad to see it get better visibility for the for the length and strength of the company going forward um but um that's that's basically how i feel about it instead of giving and then here to stay uh and yeah you can overdo it but i think once you figure out the hybrid of how things are going to be working with the with the people over the next year or two i think that's going to really drive where you take the bc plans thank you who's i'll next in um yeah i think i think we've gained a more higher awareness of uh being more um certain in how we uh assess our bcps uh and again it's going to be i hate to keep kicking the same dog around but it's imagine what we were kind of wrote about it i don't think we can be wrote about it anymore we're going to have to really stretch our thinking and but then balance it to practical things but um you know i i think this is a tie change that we have experienced in business and it's an opportunity for some real growth if companies and enterprises choose to accept it as that and maybe that becomes a competitive advantage that we gain over others i i don't know you have to be seen but um it's out there now it's uh the genies out the bottle so yeah not just liverpool mark what mark said and that is i think we're going to have to go visit that uh risk assessment um um planning and and because it's we're transforming what the workplace looks like there's going to be a balance on remote and on premise there's going to be a is going to be a balance between are they contingent workers that our people are operating with or is it full-time and then we have to do is build the bcp upon that new operating model and i think that's where some work is going to need to be done we might be thinking about well we got to be more prepared for a pandemic happening because it happened in our lives right in front of us every 100 years no it's gonna these things are probably going to happen more frequently but something else is transforming right underneath our feet in front of our eyes and that is the actual workplace is changing and so how prepared are we for managing that um and from uh you know disaster recovery or bcp planning perspective we need to do some work and upgrade those uh for that for that new that new future mode in the next three to five three to five years excellent okay well you know you've all given us some great insights today honestly very very helpful uh carol mark and stephen we very much appreciate it also our friends at datamark for putting on this program today it's been a pleasure to be part of it i'm sure we'll be in touch with this uh going forward again have a great afternoon thanks for joining thank you thank you
2021-04-06 08:19
