Summary
The report will rely on the primary tasks, procedures, and roles of a business continuity leader working in a medium-sized healthcare company. More specifically, the discussion will highlight the tasks, ongoing evaluation, and related high-level activities performed by the leader. The aim is to convince the board members how the new position would protect the business in case of a disaster.
Primary Tasks, Ongoing Evaluations, and Major Policy and Procedural Changes
Despite having a large price tag, the position of business continuity leader comes with a lot of responsibilities. Some of the primary tasks for the manager include:
- Communicating and coordinating with other players in the healthcare organization on key risk factors and possible ways of improving the overall performance (Pettit et al., 2019).
- Taking part in planning and managing risks within the organization
- Capitalizing on the business environment to improve and redefine production.
- Creating a plan to ensure the business continues to function after disruptive events such as a disaster.
Ongoing Evaluations
The ongoing evaluation for the new initiative revolves around identifying various activities performed by the company. As a manager, the focus should be on evaluating the process and the resources needed to complete each task. Ideally, the business continuity leader should understand the various services and products offered by the medium-sized healthcare company, such as those used in hospitals and homes. With this knowledge, the leader will determine how the products should be improved to ensure high productivity. Also, being a leader will require one to evaluate every activity in order to understand its manufacturing process. The findings will be shared with the employees and the management through reports and monthly updates.
Major Policy and Procedural Changes
The business continuity leader, once given a BC program, should proceed with introducing several procedural changes. For example, the leader should create a sense of direction and continuity among members to ensure they participate and adopt the new policies. Similarly, the leader/manager should identify and isolate those policies that are no longer effective. As Păunescu and Argatu (2020) observed, managers should determine whether the company has grown to the point where some rules can no longer be managed effectively. Doing so will ensure proper planning for disasters and the implementation of new policies.
Insight on How to Plan the Presentation
The process of planning the presentation to garner management and address skepticism from some of the Board members will begin by establishing credibility. The business continuity leader will share their experience on how they previously dealt with large-scale incidents or disasters. Similarly, the leader/manager should present their business plan’s information in such a way that it captures the board’s attention. This presentation can be done in line with Davoudi et al.’s (2020) recommendation of using rhetorical questions to share information in order to get members more involved. Overall, with adequate planning, the leader will be in a better position when it comes to answering difficult questions during the presentation, thus impressing the board member.
High-Level Activities
The high-level activities needed to start this initiative in the right direction would include: highlighting the critical processes within the organization and its related functions, assessing any threats (emerging or existing) that could interfere with the normal functioning of the organization, activating the emergence lists for all the sites attached to the organization, and identifying the goals and objectives of the plan targeted at protecting the business in case of a disaster.
The potential pitfalls for the above high-level activities revolve around poor risk communication and resource utilization. For instance, the pitfall for failure to highlight the company’s processes would be a wastage of time and resources. Similarly, a lack of proper assessment could lead to misinformation regarding the full extent of each threat, thus, making it impossible to identify strategies to prevent emerging risks. Another pitfall relates to conflict of interests in the management of resources in its associated sites. Lastly, any failure to identify goals and objectives would lead to slow recovery from a large-scale incident.
Challenges in the Infancy of this Initiative
The new initiative will likely face many challenges, especially during the implementation of the business continuity plan. First, the team will encounter difficulties in identifying and prioritizing the risks associated with the plan. According to Yazdi (2020), risk prioritization requires companies to “reflect on their history on vulnerability with regard to business operations” (p. 187). Therefore, the company will more likely make wrong assumptions due to a lack of adequate information. However, this challenge could be overcome through an in-depth comparison of companies based on the risks they encountered. The findings will inform the process of creating evidence-based guidelines for future use.
Another challenge is the inadequate financial resources needed to train employees on how to communicate effectively during disasters. Lack of proper training, in the end, affects the coordination and recovery processes during and after disasters. The only way to overcome this challenge is to train all the employees on effective and timely communication during disasters. The training should be expanded to include both verbal and nonverbal skills.
In conclusion, a business continuity plan should be initiated within the organization way before the disaster occurs. Having a concrete project would ensure the team, including the employees, is well-prepared to respond to the situation. While the business continuity leader will encounter several challenges, such as a lack of adequate information, during the process of implementing the plan, its success will propel the company forward. The business activities will fail if the company fails to prepare ahead of time.
References
Davoudi, S., Galland, D., & Stead, D. (2020). Reinventing planning and planners: Ideological de contestations and rhetorical appeals. Planning Theory, 19(1), 17-37. Web.
Păunescu, C., & Argatu, R. (2020). Critical functions in ensuring effective business continuity management. Evidence from Romanian companies. Journal of Business Economics and Management, 21(2), 497-520. Web.
Pettit, T. J., Croxton, K. L., & Fiksel, J. (2019). The evolution of resilience in supply chain management: a retrospective on ensuring supply chain resilience. Journal of Business Logistics, 40(1), 56-65. Web.
Yazdi, M. (2020). A perceptual computing-based method to prioritize intervention actions in the probabilistic risk assessment techniques. Quality and Reliability Engineering International, 36(1), 187-213. Web.