Failure to Exercise

The Bank of England has just been heavily criticised in a report by Deloitte into the unprecedented day-long
collapse of its Real-Time Gross Settlements system last October. Deloitte that found that the Bank’s officials had never rehearsed what would happen in the event of the platform going down for any length of time, and to compound the problem, Deloitte also discovered that the three Bank of England executives with responsibility for the system were all out of the country on the day the outage happened. Not only did the system fail, but the Bank had virtually no crisis management plans in place to deal with the incident.

Unfortunately, in my experience of providing Business Continuity services to a wide variety of organisations over many years, one of the constant themes that I come across is  the failure to exercise recovery plans. It’s not a point blank refusal to run an exercise that’s the problem, instead it’s the constant postponement that eventually results in the failure to exercise a recovery plan.

All sorts of good reasons are given for postponing an exercise, from the understandable fact that everyone is just too busy at the present time to the ludicrous idea that the recovery shouldn’t be exercised until it is known to work (which came first, the chicken or the egg?) And so it goes on, month after month, year after year, with everyone saying that they intend to run an exercise, but with nobody committing to a date or time.

Don’t get me wrong, I do have clients that do exercise their recovery plans, but they are in a minority and they don’t exercise every plan as often as they should. I’ve tried all sorts of ideas to overcome this problem, but none of them seemed to have worked. Is this just a fact of life, or can something really be done to make sure that recovery plans are exercised on a regular basis?