Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Business Continuity

Recently my team has been preparing some business continuity measures. We are running processes with the assumption that should something happen to our team in India, we, in the United States, could run their reports for them. There would not be any gaps and all would work out seamlessly – as if no one would be able to tell the difference.


This whole thing cracks me up for a number of reasons. I especially love running these processes when I think about how almost all of my American co-workers are displaced because of Sandy. We are working between two offices because our original building was and is still out of commission. The likelihood of something happening in India doesn’t seem relevant. In the past few years all the natural disasters have been happening in the U.S, but oh well.

The second assumption we are working with is that the procedures can be picked up by anyone who is not familiar with the process. Anyone should be able to run with it. The amusing aspect of this is that the procedures that I’ve read through are the most confusing things I’ve ever read in my life (and I’ve read lots of philosophy, James Joyce and Faulkner). Random screenshots are placed into the procedures without any description of what they are for or how they pertain to what you need to do. The pictures are like a conversational digression…it is somehow there yet you don’t know how it relates to the rest of the discussion until possibly far after the point.

The third part is that we are supposed to get training on the reports we are supposed to run for this practice phase. This is oxymoronic to me because it suggests that the procedures are not clear enough for people to pick up and ‘run with it’. Why else would you need training? Shouldn’t the documents be up-to-date? The few training sessions I had only made clear more discrepancies in the procedures than I first saw. Not to mention that most of the training sessions I had were not planned out. The trainers, who usually run the reports on a monthly basis, couldn’t answer my questions and we not prepared. They didn’t have the documents available to make updates to the procedures as we went through them. They left very much to be desired.

I could go on and on about the other aspects of this whole task that were silly but I’ll leave it for another entry.

1 comment:

Ann Marie said...

We had to write detailed, step by step, idiot proof, no thinking allowed procedures for them and they still couldn't follow them. There's a lot to be said for hands on training and experience.