In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was the founder and king of Corinth who was condemned to an eternity of hard labor as punishment for a crime against the gods. The labour was to roll a great boulder to the top of a hill, but every time Sisyphus, by the greatest of exertion and toil, almost reached the summit, the boulder rolled back down the hill and he had to start all over again.
Anyone who has been given the task of running a Business Continuity programme will be all too familiar with the hard work and frustration suffered by Sisyphus. By the greatest of exertion and toil you will almost manage to get the organisation to the desired degree of resiliency, when something happens, such as the implementation of a new computer system, that undoes all the hard work and means that you have to start again. We live in an ever-changing world, which means that never quite manage to achieve what we set out to when implementing Business Continuity.
The fate of the Business Continuity Manager is to continually struggle and toil to push the Business Continuity boulder up the hill, only to see it roll back down again. Does anyone volunteer for this task, or is being appointed as the Business Continuity Manager a punishment from the corporate gods? Who, in their right mind, would want to work so hard knowing that they will never be able to achieve their objectives, and that all their good work will be undone by some sort of change?
As a Business Continuity consultant I see this frustration all the time, but never quite experience it myself. My task is to help the Business Continuity Manager get the boulder part way up the hill, point out the direction that should be taken to get to the summit, and produce a nice handover report to the client explaining how they can achieve their objectives as long as they everyone pushes in the right direction. What is frustrating for the consultant though, is the knowledge that not everyone will push in the right direction, and that at some point, before the summit is reached, the boulder will be pushed off course or there will not be enough effort made to keep it rolling up the hill, and that the Business Continuity boulder will inevitably roll back down the hill again.
Frustrating, but potentially lucrative, because the client will always wonder why their Business Continuity boulder has roll backed back down the hill, and might just re-engage the consultant to get the process going again and point out what went wrong.
The Business Continuity Consultant 