Rolling Out Business Continuity Management Software For Enterprise Organizations

Enterprise organizations are typically large, complex, and highly structured, composed of thousands of team members running multifaceted operations across numerous regions around the world. The magnitude of these organizations’ scale and complexity makes the potential for disruption, damage, and loss resulting from an unexpected event far greater than that of smaller or simpler organizations.

To mitigate this increased risk, every enterprise organization should have a robust business continuity management (BCM) program built into its overall resilience strategy. Thankfully, most already do. But as organizations can lay the foundations for their BCM programs at any point throughout their lifetimes, some enterprise organizations did so far earlier in their growth trajectories, when they were much less complex and had far fewer assets at stake… and haven’t upgraded since.

So when an enterprise organization re-evaluates its BCM strategy and seeks to strengthen its approach to match the volume of present-day risk — whether it’s shifting away from outdated manual BCM methods, or merely upgrading from legacy BCM software — the transition to more advanced digital solutions can be even more complex than the very operations it’s intended to protect.

Because of the nature of large, complex organizations, rolling out modern BCM software for enterprise organizations is difficult to do well. When a high volume of team members are siloed far apart from one another, the only way to successfully adopt a solution system-wide is with a superior level of visibility and coordination that exceeds that of day-to-day tasks, and to which no one team typically has access.

Without such visibility and coordination, the size and complexity of enterprise organizations attempting a system-wide software rollout can lead to a number of failure points, including:

• Poor or insufficient adoption planning and/or execution
• Poor or insufficient cross-functional communication and/or collaboration
• A lack of clear alignment from the executive level
• Insufficient investment in change management; little or no “buy-in”

On the flip side, a successful enterprise-level BCM software rollout requires a highly structured, multiphase approach that prizes alignment, visibility, and coordination to ensure that all team members have ample opportunities to learn new processes, ask questions, and most importantly, understand why.

To help set up a BCM software adoption for your enterprise organization for success, we’ll cover the basic phases of rolling out an advanced BCM software solution at scale, including elements that each phase should contain, and some essential features to look for when investigating the marketplace for your next business continuity software solution.

Business Continuity Software Rollout Phases

Phase I: Pre-Implementation Strategy

The level of alignment, visibility, and coordination required for a successful enterprise-level business continuity software rollout isn’t typically within the purview of teams that perform or heavily focus on day-to-day operations. This guidance can only come from individuals and teams that work at or near the executive level, whose scope and access are such that they can oversee a broad, multiphase process and ensure that each team onboards successfully.

For this reason, the first phase of a successful rollout requires you to earn the trust and buy-in of team leads who work at or near that level. The backing of a dedicated executive or executive team can help your organization to secure funding, evaluate needs, design an operable workflow process, and most importantly, evangelize the value of adopting BCM software up and down your organization to foster broader consensus and maintain conceptual unity.

Secure executive alignment and support

Adopting any kind of new software for an enterprise organization requires an upfront investment, even if it can be earned back over time in the form of workflow efficiency gains and reduced risk of loss. Start by working to earn the buy-in of executive-level individuals — your COO, CIO, CRO, or the like, if possible — to begin building a broad coalition of support.

Be prepared to answer questions about how you envision converting the concept of adopting new BCM software into a clear and detailed rollout process. This includes defining measurable success metrics, such as which KPIs the initiative seeks to improve (e.g. recovery point objective [RPO], recovery time objective [RTO]), giving estimates for the timing of implementation, and negotiating the all-in budget for the initiative in good faith.

Gather requirements and perform gap analysis

To understand exactly which business continuity planning (BCP), BCM, and disaster recovery (DR) needs your new software must be able to fulfill, you need to construct a detailed map of your organization’s current BCP, BCM, and DR processes against which to assess the functionality of potential solutions. This will also assist you in discovering procedural gaps unaddressed by your current BCP, BCM, and DR processes, revealing clear opportunities for improvement.

Core questions to ask yourself when gathering requirements and identifying gaps include:

• Which BCP, BCM, and/or DR modules do you need, and does your new business continuity software offer or support those modules?
  • Examples: business continuity planning, Business Impact Analyses (BIAs), incident management, crisis management, operational risk management, security management, testing, analytics & reporting
• Does your new BC software require messaging and/or notification feature sets?
• Must your new BC software be accessible through mobile devices?
• Are the primary users of your new BC software organizational team members, end users, or both? If both, can it differentiate access based on roles?
• Can your new BC software support everyone who requires access?

Another key element of requirements gathering is understanding which physical and digital infrastructural assets your organization has available to commit to your new business continuity solution, and whether additional infrastructural investment is required for integration and support. This includes hardware and software IT assets (e.g. servers, data storage, networking capabilities, devices), HR systems, and vendor management platforms, among others.

Establish a core team and governance model

To deliver the level of attention an enterprise-level BCM software adoption demands to be successful, your rollout requires the creation of a cross-functional steering committee with SMEs from each major branch of your organization. Each SME is uniquely qualified to advise the team on how to best work through the challenges of their respective department. SMEs from IT, Risk, and Compliance should also join to advise on those areas as they undoubtedly affect every department.

As with any other steering committee, it’s important to establish leadership and a clear chain of command early. Make sure your team identifies a dedicated project manager or project lead to oversee the operation, and support them with as many system administrators as are needed.

Phase II: The Rollout

Once your organization has secured its pre-planning strategy, it’s time to begin rolling out your new BCM software solution. Your rollout strategy should begin slowly, to test your new business continuity software’s adoptability against existing BCM, BCP, and DR methods, but with the goal of ramping up over time in both speed and headcount as more teams make the shift.

Develop a rollout communications strategy

To set your teams up for a successful migration, it’s important to drive early awareness and calibrate their expectations appropriately. Create a series of regularly timed pre-launch announcements, with as many details as you can offer regarding reasons for the shift to a new BCM solution, the logistics of the transition, and directions for both where to seek additional information and where team members can share feedback with your steering committee.

These announcements should continue throughout your rollout, both to make team members aware of and prepared for their eventual participation and to inform your larger organization about benchmarks or other success metrics as they’re achieved. Transparency is key to bringing team members with you on this journey, as the more informed they are, the more included and prioritized they will feel.

Create and launch a pilot program

A software rollout for an enterprise organization must be steady, measured, and methodical. Simply put, it cannot be accomplished all at once. So the best way to begin is by testing your new BCM solution with just one team that’s considered both noncritical to essential operations and representative of the average business unit across your organization. This team can be selected by its size, scope of responsibilities, area of focus, or any other metrics you choose.

Think of this team as a pilot or test case for the larger initiative, like applying a new type or color of paint to a small section of one wall before beginning to paint every surface in a room. Give your steering committee ample time to test their communication strategy with the pilot team, both for selling them on the value of the new solution and evaluating user acceptance, and for instructing them how to adopt it.

Your steering committee should also ask for both qualitative and quantitative feedback from the pilot team as their rollout proceeds. Take note of successes and failures, and rely on results to improve the process for future teams. Use the questions raised by pilot team members as a guide for how to improve messaging for the communications that will be sent to other teams as your rollout spreads throughout one department and crosses your organization to others.

If your new BCM solution consists of multiple modules, prioritize them for your pilot team’s rollout and start with the most critical module before moving on to others.

Scale up your deployment

Once your pilot team approaches a full and secure migration to your new business continuity software, and the team seems to be able to work with it as intended, it’s time to broaden the pace and scope of your rollout. This should proceed in a systematic way and align to a predetermined cadence by initiating the shift with individual teams, groups of teams, or whole connected arms of your organization in steady, cascading fashion.

When prioritizing teams or batches of teams to determine the order of migration, start with teams whose work carries both a higher degree of impact but a lower degree of complexity. This may include Compliance teams — whose day-to-day functions likely touch nearly every team in every silo across your organization — and administrative teams, whose ground-level operations support the efforts of more complex endeavors.

Remember, your pilot team was a test case, but feedback and iterative improvements to both migration communications and instructions should be gathered and applied in ongoing fashion.

Once a high enough percentage of your first “wave” of teams has successfully migrated, it’s time to move on to teams whose functions are more complex. Your steering committee will have advised as to the unique circumstances for each wave of deployment, but as the type of work performed by each new team that makes the leap grows in complexity, expect new hiccups and challenges to arise along the way and budget appropriate time to address them as they surface.

Data migration and integration strategy

Many of the functions of your new business continuity software likely rely on legacy and historical data that your organization already stores. To help your new solution successfully and accurately deliver all of its intended functionality, this data must be integrated into the system.

Challenges to migrating legacy and historical data into your new BCM software can include:

• Some or all legacy data is housed within legacy or obsolete systems
• Some data is unstructured and not in a ready-to-migrate format
• Some data is machine-generated (e.g. system and network activity logs), so while it’s structured, there is a high volume
• Some data is heavily customized to suit earlier operations requirements or requirements of prior BCM solutions
• Some data may be incomplete or incompatible with the new system
• Your organization has accrued a considerable amount of tech debt over time

As such, the applicable legacy and historical data that must be fed into your new BCM solution must be processed and cleaned to be ready for ease of migration. This may take more time than your organization would like, but the more readily it can be inputted into your new system, the faster and more effectively your BCM solution will have a complete account of your organization’s operation, and the more efficaciously it can perform going forward.

To improve the security and ease-of-use for team members accessing your new BCM solution, consider instituting the use of a single sign-on (SSO) API integration, preferably one that requires multifactor authentication, the use of a VPN connection, or both. More advanced BCM software solutions also include automated data synchronization across their systems, so as one team member securely inputs data in one location, the network updates in real time.

Phase III: Change Management and User Adoption

After all applicable teams in your organization have either completed or are set to complete their transition to your new BCM solution, your primary rollout phase will start to wind down — but there’s more work to be done to secure an effective migration, both conceptually and procedurally. This includes creating additional trainings, establishing in-team leadership roles, and developing a systemwide communication strategy for alerts, updates, and more.

Offer additional role-based training

Your new business continuity software more than likely includes initial walkthroughs and trainings for team members to acclimate to the landscape of its operating environment, understand how to engage with its functionality, and know where to find resources for additional help. You may also have developed your own curated walkthroughs that address how you want team members to use your new solution for your organization’s specific business continuity needs.

While this sets up a strong introduction, the level of engagement you want for your team members may require additional educational guidance differentiated based on their roles — and beyond your rollout, that doubles as future-forward trainings for new team members down the line. Consider building modules for each user tier, such as managers, department heads, and general staff, and distinguish each by whether those users focus on BCP, BCM, or DR matters.

Most importantly, as you have throughout your rollout, make sure to include messaging that drives home why your BCM software is the best-fit solution for your organization. When asking existing team members to make a sea change in their approach to such a core process, or seeking to impart its value to new team members just getting oriented, selling your teams on the why behind its use is critical to successful adoption.

Build a network of in-team BCM “champions”

As with any rollout of a broad cross-functional initiative, each team is likely to have at least one member who demonstrates a higher level of support for the adoption of new BCM software, a higher degree of aptitude with its use, or both. These team members can be crucial ground-level assets for addressing other team members’ concerns, assisting other team members with day-to-day problem solving, and maintaining localized organizational alignment.

Work with your team managers, or others who work within your BCP, BCM, and DR teams, to identify power users that demonstrate agreement and advanced facility with your new business continuity software and empower them as first-level “champions” for your system. Make your teams aware of these designations so other members can use them as resources, and let your champions build a network to offer advice and additional support to one another.

Develop a continuing communications tempo

Your rollout communications strategy was critical to engaging with your business continuity team members and driving them to engage with your new BCM software in kind. But this is just the start of a longer, ongoing conversation between them and your larger enterprise organization.

To help the relationship between teams involved with your enterprise software rollout and your business continuity software to grow and deepen, set a regular communications tempo, such as weekly emails, to keep team members informed about challenges, successes, and learning opportunities. Acknowledge standout team members who go above and beyond to discover new efficiencies or help their teammates with improving their skills or overcoming obstacles.

Also, as an advanced technology, your BCM solution will grow and evolve over time, so there is always something new to share with teams that work within it. Keep those teams abreast of system updates, new features, or “tips and tricks” that can assist with its acclimation and use.

Phase IV: Audits and Optimization

Your teams have all received training on your new BCM solution, understand the reasons for the shift, have spent time working within it, and are continually educated about the system and the benefits your organization has gained from it. As your team members continue to organically grow their skills, your steering committee should look at how to move from engagement to preparedness, stay legally compliant, and turn user data into insight-driven improvements.

Validation through testing

You’ve made the leap to an advanced digital BCM system, but to ensure that your enterprise organization is equipped to receive all the benefits it offers, your teams need opportunities to develop musculature through practical tests and trial runs. Depending on the BC solution you choose, this can range from desktop exercises for individual team members to cross-system simulations that evaluate how members across teams work together through the system in real-life scenarios.

Each exercise or simulation you run will deliver valuable data about how well both the system is working and your teams operate within it. Testing can reveal weaknesses across your BC program, whether the system itself, the content of trainings, how those trainings are conducted, or other BCM, BCP, or DR gaps that may have been missed. This data should be recorded, and — depending on what testing has revealed — reports should be shared with both team members and stakeholders, including your steering committee, team managers, “champions,” and, if they can provide assistance, your BCM solution provider.

Audit-ready compliance

Increasingly, regulatory agencies at multiple levels of government are requiring organizations that are either of a certain size or that work in specific industries to provide proof of business continuity planning and business continuity management systems as part of their overall resilience programs. This is especially the case for enterprise-level organizations and organizations that work in industries that support vital pillars of critical infrastructure, considering the volume of potential damage and loss at stake.

Developers of more advanced BCM software have accounted for compliance requirements like these by building native audit-responsive reporting functionality into their systems to meet the needs of such regulations, such as GDPR in the EU. If your solution doesn’t already include a way to generate audit-ready documentation out of the box, you may need to either create a custom template yourself or contact your solution provider for additional assistance.

Continuous improvement cycles

Tech debt accumulates when there’s a growing divergence between your organization’s business needs and a business solution’s deliverables. To minimize this, schedule regular system health checks to audit functionality, security, usability, comprehensibility, accessibility, and other attributes that affect how well your teams can work with your solution both now and in the future.

One of the best indicators of adoption effectiveness is direct feedback from team members, just as it was beginning with your pilot team and consistently throughout each wave of your rollout. This feedback loop can keep delivering valuable insights to your steering committee and drive positive changes for training, everyday use, communications, and in-system customizations that map to your organization’s unique BC preparedness concerns.

Additionally, the workspaces within your BCM software that house your organization’s business continuity plans or business continuity planning workflows should be regularly updated to map to organizational changes as they occur. This should already be part of your organization’s regular BCP maintenance and reviews, but establishing cross-checks encourages continuous adherence.

Adoptability at top of mind: Finding the right business continuity software 

Considering its size and complexity, rolling out any new initiative across an enterprise organization is a hefty endeavor that requires careful planning, steady guidance, and a commitment to the hard work of building and maintaining alignment in all directions — up, down, and across the organizational chart. To make the transition to a new BCM solution as smooth as possible, the software you choose should be intuitive and easy to use.

With a streamlined user experience that makes your organization’s resilience posture more accessible and easier to maintain, Noggin delivers next-level intelligence and control that enables your BCM, BCP, and DR teams to:

• Simplify your BIA process and drive engagement with built-in, step-by-step guidance to ensure the capture of rich, insightful data that helps you truly understand your business
• Identify and map dependencies quickly, stay informed when one is at risk, and visualize and track them to make informed decisions and take effective risk mitigation actions
• Input a consistent recovery strategy across your organization including response plans, roles, responsibilities, and checklists, which can be deployed in seconds when needed
• Test event scenarios to ensure your teams are prepared to handle any situation
• Replace paper-based, static business continuity plans with dynamic, digitized plans that are easy to adjust, always up-to-date, and available on any device
• Gain greater visibility of your business continuity posture and offer more transparency to team members with flexible dashboards and analytics capabilities
• Manage business continuity processes proactively and uncover valuable insights with consolidated data and business intelligence visualization on interactive dashboards
• Inform decision-making with custom reports including historical data with charts, recommendations, and automated approvals, and publish them or share via email

The amount of detailed work to build, operate, and track business continuity management, business continuity planning, and disaster recovery efforts across an enterprise organization — through every department, silo, and region in which it operates — demands a BC software solution capable of meeting complex needs. This is the best way to mitigate the risk, disruption, and damage adverse events can bring, and by proxy, protect your organization’s future.

But a BCM solution is only as good as your teams’ ability to use it. And Noggin makes it easier to onboard, train, roll out, evaluate, and improve your BC workflows for years to come.

See for yourself when you request a demo of Noggin today.