As I mentioned in a previous blog, many companies struggle with effective planning for disasters and disruptions. One need look only at the last week to see why this is of increasing importance - severe weather in the US, unrest in Egypt, and a bombing at a major airport in Russia just before that. For global organizations, all of these could have had an impact on operations. But the logical question is how can you plan for things that are by their very nature random?
I am not going to go in depth into Business Continuity Planning, though that field has many good techniques for increasing the resilience of your organization. But I do want to talk about the workforce side specifically.
The key to effective planning for disruptions is knowing what you do day-to-day, who does it, and what can be stopped / modified and for how long. As I mentioned in a previous post, the most effective workforce planning moves below high level outputs and begins to look at processes, who does them, the skills required, the effort involved, etc. That same knowledge can assist with planning for disruptions. In the case of a disruption, you must answer 2 fundamental questions:
1) What resources will not be available to us and for how long?
2) What resources can I redeploy for response to the disruption and for how long?
Obviously this could also come down to diminished capacity or reduced output for some resources, rather than total unavailability, but the approach is the same. Planners will want to be able to quickly tell decision makers how resource availability and productivity will impact business outcomes and for how long. For example, if a facility is unavailable, how will that impact production / revenue? If as in the case of the government agency I mentioned in my last post, I need to redeploy resources to help deal with the disaster, what won't get done and what will the impact to organization performance be? How long can I operate in this alternative resourcing structure? If the right models and data are in place, planners can also look at alternatives such as temporary resource increases and help determine the impact in terms of cost, output, etc. Decision makers can then determine what to do about it in a much more disciplined way, with a full understanding of the consequences of their decisions.
The techniques behind this require some skill, but if the right workforce planning foundations are in place, they can actually be executed very rapidly. I have seen these techniques dramatically increase the resilience of organizations and their ability to respond to disruptions.
