Agile Business Continuity

Please excuse the title’s reference to Shakin’ Stevens. If you don’t know who Shakin’ Stevens is, then I would advise you to maintain your ignorance.

Over the last week I have been spending a lot of time with a number of clients who are busy developing their organisational resilience. One of the most useful techniques we use during these discussions is the above, recently named by a client as a lipstick chart. The chart above is of our own organisation and as you can see it is used as a framework for a wider governance framework.

Many organisations I am involved with seldom have any form of organisation chart or an idea of the activities which each area is responsible for. My apologies to those who do maintain this information but I find that in the environments I work in this is seldom the case.

The exercise that we go through is to grab a large sheet of paper and a bunch of multicoloured Postit notes and get to work mapping out the organisation, or a slice of the organisation if this exercise is too great. First we structure the business units and areas of responsibility, and then map out the activities. Once the activities have been defined we can begin to mark each activity as either Critical, Priority or Business As Usual using Red, Amber and Blue Postit notes to indicate relative importance. Critical activities being those which must be sustained, Amber being those which can be interrupted for a short period and Blue for everything else.

This is of course a very rough map of the organisation and does not represent a formal assessment within a business continuity programme, but I have found it useful in terms of understanding the priorities of the business (what resilience means to them). It also provides the business with a context in which to discuss the challenges they are likely to hit when developing their organisation’s resilience.

Related posts:

1. Lipstick Rolldown
2. Amber Lights
3. Where Is The Big Risk?
4. Tick Box Testing
5. Blink