Tech planning for a minor disaster

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• Summer,
• Morning,
• Ground,
• Continuity

Gary Flood ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 26 Nov 2007 17:13 GMT

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While many organisations have business-continuity plans, it's fair to assume that most of them were drawn up with the kind of disaster in mind that hit the Buncefield oil depot, in Hertfordshire in December 2005.

But the disaster that leads a company to put its carefully crafted plan into action doesn't have to be so extreme. As this summer's unexpected floods showed, low-level disruption can be just as difficult to deal with.

Take the experience of law firm Irwin Mitchell this summer. Faced with a car park full of filthy water rapidly seeping into its Sheffield city-centre offices, managers needed to have a way to continue the firm's operations in such a way that its customers wouldn't know there had been any issues at all.

Unseasonably heavy rain this summer led to localised flooding across large parts of the North and Midlands, often in places with low exposure to such phenomena historically. Sheffield was just one city whose public services, businesses and community found themselves thrown into difficulties and disrupted due to overflowing rivers and canals.

One of the UK's largest law firms, with roots stretching back to 1912, Irwin Mitchell has a major call-centre operation and other back-office staff working out of its two new buildings in Mill Sands in the city centre. In fact, 1,000 of the firm's 4,500 total headcount work at the site.

Early on the morning of 25 June staff turning up for work — those that could get in, at any rate — found themselves literally wading into the office. Though not as severely affected as other parts of the city, water was rising and the ground floor was quickly becoming a less than attractive working environment.

Managers could have been forgiven for being caught totally unawares. "Sheffield hasn't had a major flood in 150 years," pointed out business improvement manager Peter Sloane. "When we had these purpose-built buildings made ready that just wasn't part of the risk assessment."

By 9am, a foot of water was sitting in the ground floors of both buildings. "IT is a crucial element in what we do here," said Gary Thomas, the company's head of IT operations. "As a full-service law firm, we deal with a large volume of transactions — 6,000 calls can come into the call centre on any given day. But we also have very tight service-level agreements with many of our clients, in insurance especially. We need to be very responsive. We even have one-hour agreement clauses in some contracts — as in, we need to respond to a client in that period or face financial penalties. So we cannot afford to be down at all."

Patently, for health and safety reasons alone, Irwin Mitchell staff couldn't sit in that water though, no matter how important those service-level agreements.

The good news is that the company had plans in place for disruptions to business. The challenge was seeing if they were more than a set of documents in a binder or  if they would actually work.

Part of the response was organisational. The majority of the call-centre team (30 out of 45) obeyed already laid-down instructions to relocate to the company's fifth-floor boardroom, which was immediately transformed into a shadow call centre. The rest — 100 staff in all — immediately started relocating to a workplace recovery site some 35 miles away, in Elland, West Yorkshire — a process that meant the company was ready for operation in its new "home" at the start of the next business day.

However, a very significant part of the response was technology-based. Moving the call centre upstairs, for instance, was made a lot easier by the company's integrated communications network. "The voice over IP [VoIP] has always been more about functionality for us, not cost saving," said Thomas. "We had already had frame relay, for instance, so transfer of calls had been easy. But, by using the ACD [automatic call distributor] functionality, we could now move staff to a new location and they immediately had the same phone functionality and extension numbers — that was very useful." The same applied to staff logging in next morning at the Elland remote site, he added.

VoIP played a part in the overall success of Irwin Mitchell's response to the June flooding problem but...

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