Business continuity management
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JC sounds off on Management™
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Business continuity management
/ˈbɪznɪs ˌkɒntɪˈnjuːəti ˈmænɪʤmənt/ (n.)
A regulator-mandated hostage to fortune. A warehouse somewhere in the boondocks to which everyone is meant to relocate should some catastrophic event knock the main office out of action. BCM facilities were maintained at great expense, annually practiced on, but never used in anger until the COVID 19 pandemic, at which point they proved as useful as a chocolate teapot. Who would have guessed?
Until coronavirus came along, business continuity management executives were an embittered, disregarded, disenfranchised, but yet strangely redundancy-proof contingent, made to live out their days like ascetics in an enormous, draughty warehouse in Aldershot, with a curiously limited number of parking spaces and only one establishment selling “edible” food within realistic walking distance of of the facility, being the sole franchisee of Chester the Chicky Chick’s Charcoal Chicken “chain” of “family restaurants”.
Now, every dog has its day, and boy-oh-boy, coronavirus should have been theirs.
But ain’t life a bitch sometimes?
When, finally, that black swan-fluttering, long tail-wagging, epochal event of systematic disruption is visited upon you; when, at last, the diamanté-encrusted citadel to which you lucky others daily bend your joyful steps is struck down and rendered a crippled, toxic ghost-town inside a three-mile exclusion zone — when, ultimately, your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your middle management layer, yearning to freely populate their decks — are obliged trudge like obedient beasts and fowls through the teeming deluge, two-by-two, towards your magnificent hill-top ark where you have been waiting an eternity to give them succour — when that day finally comes, it turns out they can’t come to your draughty warehouse, even if they wanted to, but — worse! — they don’t want to. They are getting along just fine logging in from a laptop in the spare room. They aren’t even missing the business continuity warehouse facility you so lovingly curate for them!
Business continuity management: the one team whose long-term prognosis worsened as the pandemic played out and everyone else’s improved: a cautionary tale against providing in advance for contingencies you cannot hope to anticipate.