- Identify the Automation Business Continuity Owner
- Know Your Invocation Criteria
- Be Clear on Roles and Responsibilities
- Have Thorough Documentation in Place
- Next Steps: From Planning to Action
Identify the Automation Business Continuity Owner
Knowing the owner is one of the most critical knowledge points you need to keep your automation program afloat (besides maintenance 😉).
The first thing to ask yourself is whether there’s a clearly identified business owner for each automation.
Hopefully, the answer to that question is yes. Ultimately, this person is accountable and responsible for making sure that the business continuity elements of an automated process are considered.
They'll be responsible for ensuring that the response to getting this work done in any one of the possible disruption scenarios is factored into your overall business continuity plan.
So, are they clear on their role as the owner and the decision maker?
In practice, in organizations where automation has been in place for a long time and hasn’t necessarily evolved much, we witness a drift in accountability; the center of excellence (CoE) ends up taking on much of the worrying about the process and its output than the original business owner.
And that’s a scenario you want to avoid at all costs, for all the reasons mentioned in our methodology.
Questions to Consider:
- Have you got a clear owner?
- Are they clear on what their role is and what the decision is for them?
A useful analogy could be to talk to them about bringing a digital worker to them because, in theory, the work hasn't moved out of ops. It's now being fulfilled by a digital resource under their control rather than an operational resource under that leader's control.
Know Your Invocation Criteria
The second theme in your business continuity plan will be your invocation criteria.
You'll hear the phrase "invoke" quite a lot when people talk about business continuity planning. People will talk about “invoking the BC plan”. And to invoke it effectively, it’s important to be clear on the invocation criteria.
We discussed common possible disruption scenarios in earlier blogs of this series, and how business continuity could be a broad-ranging subject.
Questions to Consider:
- Are we clear on what the plan is, and all the people to be involved in the invocation decision?
- Do we know which version of the plan we're invoking?
- If we're talking about a single automation being down, are we going to invoke the plan straight away?
- Do we have a grace period during which we consider a process will be back up soon enough, and we decide to relax some internal resources to mitigate the temporary disruption?
- Do we know the critical point where we say: "This is a big deal now, even if we solve the problem with the automation, we don't have enough digital workers or other resources to get the work done within the SLA"?
his will help you ensure everyone is aligned around the decision. The last thing you want is to enact your plan and have this conversation on the fly as the world is potentially on fire around you.
Be Clear on Roles and Responsibilities
Roles and responsibilities are an expansion of ownership. The owner is a key stakeholder but not the only stakeholders involved. And no business continuity plan can be invoked without a clear understanding of who does what, where and when.
Some stakeholders will need to have some input into the decision-making process; They may provide important data or information to the decision-maker. Beyond that, there are also stakeholders who don’t do any of that, but they care about the output of what we’re doing. And they’ll also need to be informed.
Questions to Consider:
- Have you identified all those stakeholders?
- Are they clear on their roles and responsibilities as part of this process?
- Have you created a RACI matrix to identify who is responsible, accountable, consulted and informed
- Is everyone clear on what they need to do in the scenario at hand?
- Do we know who needs to be informed in case we enact the BC plan?
Have Thorough Documentation in Place
The business continuity plan itself should be documented, or there’s no plan. But documentation goes beyond the BC plan itself.
Looking at your individual automations, have you got the manual process documented?
If it’s documented, has it been tested?
The BC plan may involve getting some activities done manually. If so, you may have to get colleagues to complete a process they aren't necessarily experts in.
Questions to Consider:
- Have we created instructions?
- Have we given them to some users to validate that they make sense and that they could complete the process in an emergency?
- Beyond that, is the documentation legible and understandable?
- Has the process owner taken charge of making sure it’s regularly validated?
It's one thing to ensure the documentation is available, legible , and easy to understand, but it goes out of the window if the process has changed six months ago, and the documentation was never updated. Validating the documentation means checking it's usable and correct, ensuring that when we pass it to someone to do the work, they are completing the correct process.
Next Steps: From Planning to Action
With those questions thoroughly considered, you have established the critical outlines of a thorough business continuity plan for your automation program.
Next step (although nobody wishes for that): Invoking (or enacting) the business continuity plan.
We’ll dive into the details of a successfully enacted plan with a concrete possible scenario in our next blog.
