Business Contingency Planning

As I sit here waiting to fly home, I thought that I would review how we have coped as a business with the enforced stay in Bahrain, is there anything that Mackenzie Morgan can do better or differently to ensure that our business successfully continues! Incidentally, there was an excellent programme on the BBC World Service earlier in the week on the same topic, it is due to be repeated catch it if you can!

Let’s look at what we have done well,

Work as a virtual office, employ the technology to support us not constrain ourselves to a physical location.
The use of the resources of the Cloud has been a successful use of our time and resources, we are able to progress a new project without the need for a face-to-face meeting, while meetings are vital to the successful outcome of a project, the ability to review, comment and amend documents wherever and whenever is equally vital.
The use of VOIP to use the correct terminology, Skype to you and me has again paid dividends, both in business and personal terms in being able to hold a conversation without feeling that the “meter is running” when connecting via mobile or hotel fixed networks, roaming charges can mount up!

What would we have done differently/should we do in the future:

We employ a file backing up system, based on procedures when we are working from the office, we must look at on-line backing up of business critical documents, it is possible in prolonged episodes client documents can develop greatly from the backed up documents held in the office, it is not a good image to ask the client for a copy of the last submitted document.
When travelling, we must look at our Terms of Business, in this case we were able to pre-empt a future visit and get ahead of the game, we might not be so lucky in the future. It is not necessarily a volcano in Iceland, it could be storms in the East Coast, or record breaking snow-falls across Europe.

The whole rational behind contingency planning is to review what has happened, predict as far as is possible and ensure that the adverse events will not affect you! I do not think anybody would have predicted the events that have unfolded over the last 7 days, however, volcanos erupting and high [ressure weather systems are not unusual occurrences so possible somebody should have had a plan in place. The fact that aircraft and engine manufacturers had a safety case that stated the only actions in case of an eruption is not fly speaks volumes of our collective skills with regard to contingency planning!

Here is to an improved world with greater contingency plans in place!