By Sam | January 4, 2015

How Can I Tell If My Staff Is Keeping Their Business Continuity Plan Up-To-Date?

If you’re like most Credit Unions, you’ve worked hard to get your Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan into shape this past year. If you are an Ongoing Operations client, you’ve also updated your business impact analysis (BIA) and probably had a tabletop exercise. But what happens after the “formal” activities are over?

How can you tell if your staff remains engaged in BCP planning?

For the most part, if you are still relying on a paper plan it will be pretty tough for you to measure your staff’s participation in the planning process. Outside of the normal “sign in” sheets you might compile during regularly scheduled DR/BCP related activities (fire drills, shelter-in-place drills, tabletop, etc.) there really isn’t a way to see if the plan is being kept up-to-date.

However, if you have an online plan (like CURecover) there are many ways to measure your staff’s activities (and as a result be able to demonstrate activity during an NCUA Audit):

1. Check the web stats on your portal – One of the reasons we love SharePoint as our development platform is the built-in reporting functionality known as Web Analytics. Web analytics data is available at the site collection level and the individual site level. Key performance indicators that you can use are:
   • Number of Daily Unique Visitors – As the admin, you might log on several times/day. But are others joining you?
   • Top Visitors (remember Microsoft things everything is a “website” thus the term visitor vs user)
   • Top Pages – Are the department pages beings accessed/updated?
2. Have your administrator add a “Site User” webpart – This webpart can be added to your CURecover homepage and will show all of your BCP portal users and their current status (online/offline).
3. Last but not least – Schedule a monthly BCP login event. Have end users login to perform a small task such as verifying their call tree or vendor contacts. Those who are regularly using the site will not have to call you to have their password reset – the rest will. Not the most glamorous way to find out who is staying engaged but it works!

On a side note, forgotten passwords are the bane of any site administrator but it is especially troubling when the password is disaster recovery/business continuity related. You need your team to be able to easily and quickly log into the BCP portal. Ongoing Operations has developed a password sync tool that will integrate your AD passwords with our portal. Reach out to your account manager today to learn more about making this happen in 2015. One less password to remember during a crisis!

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