Disaster Recovery Journal Fall 2023

The Importance of the BIA Pre-Work By MICHAEL HERRERA O nce upon a time, there was a busi ness continuity consulting firm that held BIA interviews with their clients without getting them to provide basic information about The Benefits of Obtaining Their Information Ahead of Time if you were not planning to do so. If our experience is any guide, you will be glad you did. How We Structure The BIA Pre-Work Process

After we started gathering information ahead of time, the following good things happened: n Our interviews got shorter by around 45 minutes. n The effort required to accomplish the goals of the interview was much reduced. n The interview experience became less irritating for the participants. n The quality of the information we received went way up, improving the quality of our BIAs and everything based on them. Are you going to be conducting BIAs at your organization anytime soon? If so, I encourage you to incorporate a phase of pre-work into your process,

their business units ahead of time. As the owner and CEO of that firm, I can tell you, doing it that way was a big mistake. The interviews went on for hours since we had to gather every little scrap of infor mation while we were all sitting there. Worse, the quality of the data obtained was not very good since people tended to leave out a lot of critical information. Eventually, we hit on the idea of pro viding our clients with forms request ing certain information beforehand. We referred to this as the BIA pre-work, and after we started incorporating it into our process, our collaborations and the quality of the final results both improved.

In this article, I’ll explain how we struc ture the BIA pre-work process in working with our clients. There are many ways of doing it, but this approach has worked well for us. We always try to ensure the pre-work takes no longer than 30 minutes to com plete. Using BIA Software When we do BIAs, we utilize BIA software. This tool has a robust pre-work functionality. It enables us to prepare the forms for the client and then send the department subject matter experts a link to their customized form. The client clicks on

26 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | FALL 2023