This month’s blog review is not just a post, it is perhaps also an Easter Egg in disguise, considering the holiday season we’re in. Truly, it is a great pleasure to present Oz’s Business Continuity Blog, written by by Andy Osborne, a consultant in business continuity and risk management from the UK. It is a blog as a blog should be, separated from the jargon and seriousness on Andy’s main business site and dedicated to reporting on Andy’s reflections on the everyday haps and mishaps that life brings him. It is a personal blog and it is a fun blog, but it never forgets its main goal: to spread life’s own lessons in business continuity and risk management.
Risk Management Simplified
I first found out about Andy Osborne when I was looking for a practical handbook on risk management. I found it in his book titled Risk Management Simplified, a book that I praised for its clarity in my review:
This is a book that is very easy to follow. Even in all it’s simplicity, this book is far from superficial as far as risk management goes. Osborne has managed to scoop up the essentials and presents them in an elegant and completely non-academic approach, and therein lies its greatest value.
The same elegance and simplicity also permeates Andy Osborne’s blog, and that is what makes it so fun to read, and why I enjoy recommending it to my own readers.
Blog Highlights
Normally, for my blog highlights I will choose posts that have high value, academically, professionally or otherwise, or I will pick posts that extend or support my own blog musings. With Andy’s blog that is a bit difficult, because as I already said, his blog is as a blog should be, showing a more personal side of his busy and hectic professional life. While my own posts are strictly non-personal for the most, with my Mondaine wristwatch purchase being the odd exception perhaps, Andy has truly mastered the art of business blogging, using his real-life and at-home experiences – sprinkled with a dash of understated British humor – to convey the lessons of business continuity and risk management.
In A Team Effort, he relates building a good hockey team to building a business continuity team:
When you think about it, this isn’t a million miles away from the process of developing the capability of our incident management and business recovery teams. We start off with a new team, some of whom are more experienced than others and some of whom need more training than others. So we carry out the necessary training and we exercise and test. And then, just when we think we’ve cracked it, for whatever reason, some of the key players move on and we have to bring in new members. So the process of developing and gelling into an effective team starts all over again.
In An Icy Crisis he reminds us that a home improvement job not well done may come back to hunt you later:
The problem is that implementing risk mitigation measures often involves some effort or expense, or both. And quite often there’s something more pressing or more interesting to do. As a result, the mitigation measures are sometimes poorly implemented or not completed, or not monitored for their effectiveness. But the bottom line is that, to be effective, mitigation measures have to actually be done, rather than just written down in a risk register and forgotten about.
In No Business Like Snow Business he tells the truth about working from home during an emergency situation:
But how many of our business continuity plans make the assumption that people are able to do so? And how many of us bother to validate that assumption by checking what facilities people actually have at home and by carrying out a realistic home-working test? My experience is that it’s lots and not many, in that order. So if you’re one of those who’s making that assumption, my advice would be to have a go and see how well it actually works.
These are just some examples of what you can find on Andy’s blog. He doesn’t post very often, maybe once or twice a month, but when he does post, it is profoundly meaningful, and it is more than worth stopping by his blog. As to my own blogging efforts, there’s a lot I can learn from Andy. That said, I have found my style and my purpose and I’m not going to change the mission of this blog anytime soon, but I always find Andy’s way of writing a great inspiration for my own postings.
Link
- acumen-bcp.co.uk: Oz’s Business Continuity Blog
Related posts
- husdal.com: Risk Management Simplified
- husdal.com: Business Continuity blogs of note
