Many organisations implement some sort of workarea recovery solution as part of their business continuity strategy. This often involves relocating people to another facility elsewhere.

A surprising number of organisations, however, never test this part of the strategy, perhaps because they feel it’s too difficult; or too costly; or too time consuming; or too risky.

Admittedly it can be a bit of a challenge to take a large group of people out of the business for a chunk of time, transport them miles away and go through the hassle of creating the environment to enable them to work there. There might also be availability or cost issues to consider. All of which can make it tempting to just not bother. 

But if you don’t test it, how do you know that it will work when you need it to?

Whilst there’s no substitute for actually taking people to their nominated recovery site and getting them to work from there for a while, some of the issues can be flushed out without going to the extent of a mass-migration.

One of the most common of these is the realisation that the stuff we’re used to having around us in our normal work place isn’t available at the recovery site. Stuff that we didn’t realise was so important to us until we tried to work without it.

But this sort of thing can be easily identified, by simply working from a desk other than our own for a day or two. And flagging it whenever something doesn’t work quite as we expect or whenever we have to go back to our own desk for something.

We often don’t realise how important some of the stuff we have around us is until it’s not there anymore. Far better to find that out while we still have it though, don’t you think?