YEAR-END RESILIENCE PLANNING

Year-End Resilience Planning

By Jesse Kauffman, Lead Consultant, Everyday Business Resilience Group

We’re closing in on the end of year two of a worldwide change in the way organizations of all types and sizes operate.  With year-end activities in full swing, both typical business activities along with unique activities due to the ongoing pandemic response around the globe, now’s a great time to take some basic steps to ensure your own organization is more resilient for 2022.  

Let’s look at some actions you and your organization can take over the next few weeks to minimize the potential for negative impacts from potential business disruptions.

Action 1:  Ask your key partners, vendors, and suppliers to share their business continuity and crisis management plans with you.  

The last thing your organization needs during a crisis is for a critical supplier to also suffer a crisis at the same time!  While you’re trying to guide your organization through an interruption, you want to know that the companies and people you depend on are able to continue to provide the goods and services that you need to maintain your own operations.  

Take some time to review the business continuity and crisis management plans of your critical vendors to ensure that they have the plans and processes in place to manage their own interruptions and crisis, and that their ability to support you as a client is included in those plans.  And if they don’t have any plans in place?  Give them my contact info!

Action 2:  Document (if you haven’t yet) and review the lessons your organization has learned this year.

With all of the change that’s happened in the last year, on top of all of the change that happened the previous year, chances are you’ve been swamped just keeping everything going.  The next few weeks are a great time to document what you’ve learned, to review it, and to incorporate into your own planning.  It can be easy to lose track of lessons learned as the pressures of daily operations pick up.  

The lessons from the challenges you’ve worked through need to be captured so that you can incorporate them into both emergency planning and into making your daily operations more efficient.  The focus on critical processes that emergencies drive likely enabled you to see ways to improve your business that you otherwise would have missed.  Take advantage of those observations and make them work for your benefit!

Action 3:  Plan a test of your own business continuity or crisis management plan focusing on a risk that hasn’t happened over the last two years.

If your organization is still in operations at this point in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, then your focus has likely been completely on risks associated with the pandemic, specifically around illness, emergency regulations from government agencies, and labor shortages.  But as we’ve seen with the supply chain impacts around the world, there are ripple effects from the initial impacts that can take months to become visible.  

Chances are, you know your organization has a risk, or risks, that are still present, and that you haven’t had a chance to mitigate due to the efforts required to deal with COVID impacts.  If you plan an exercise, even a basic table-top exercise, you can take the first step to mitigating risk to your business by getting a realistic idea of what the impact of an untested risk can be to your business.  And as we’ve seen with the global supply chain struggles, there’s an excellent chance that what you learn from running an exercise will help you mitigate those risks no matter when or where they happen.

In conclusion, these next few weeks are the perfect time to prepare your business, and yourself, for the upcoming year.  Hopefully these 3 actions will help you have a successful 2022, not only ensuring the resilience of your business during a crisis, but ensuring that resilience is present for your business everyday.

FOOTNOTE:  Jesse has 17+ years of experience in industries including, appliances, plastics, nutrition, and pharmaceuticals, across all aspects of business operations.  He is currently helping companies ranging from large global corporations to and small local businesses.  He and his wife, Josi, are proud parents of 3 wonderful kids and are trying their best to prepare for the upcoming holidays.  Contact Jesse at 812-568-0515 and jesse.kauffman@everydaybusinessresilience.com if you have any questions pertains to his article.