Evaluating &Implementing Business Continuity Plan for a Corporate

Challenges Faced by HealthCare Strategies Inc

Background

HealthCare Strategies Inc. was founded in 2005 to deliver a wide variety of healthcare and information technology services to home health agencies, hospices, hospitals, and other health-care providers in a cost-effective manner. The company focuses on the home health and hospice industry, offering services such as systems development; training and support; billing, collecting, and other financial processes and consulting. HealthCare Strategies also recently began offering agency management software products to clients.

In order for the company to provide services to clients located around the kingdom, it must be able to deliver reliable and secure access to its server-based databases. Its clients rely on access to HealthCare Strategies systems to enter and view data from remote locations such as hospitals and clinics. They need to access a variety of applications to support essential business processes such as billing.

In early May 2010, following several days of heavy rains, a devastating flood hit the area of Jeddah, where HealthCare Strategies' headquarters building is located. The president of the company Mr. Wurm said, if he had parked his truck where he usually does in the building's parking garage, the entire truck would have been under water. The force of the water moved cars and dumpsters. The flood, the worst in the area in 30 years, made national news and forced officials at HealthCare Strategies to do some quick thinking.

Although water reached within a few feet of the company's offices on the second floor of the building, they were not flooded out. It was also fortunate that building's electrical power and T1 line never went down.The employees had no way of getting to and from work because the building itself was virtually inaccessible. "We had to figure out what we were going to do," Wurm says. "We didn't know how long we would be out of the office" and how employees who handle time-sensitive billing applications would be able to do their jobs. "Then we realized that there should have been a system to take care of such situation," Wurm says. The decision was made to let the company's employee's work from home until the floodwaters subsided.

Wurn also highlights that clients must be pleased with HealthCare Strategies that should have been able to continue its operations even during the flood or any other natural disaster. Should there be a system in place, company employees will be in a position to work from home, accessing information from the HealthCare Strategies database. The company's health-care clients will also be able to connect to HealthCare Strategies systems and conduct important business operations such as invoicing and billing.

HealthCare Strategies' operations slowly and gradually interrupted and it becomes difficult to estimate how much that downtime has cost the company. Besides that there was a severe problem for the clients that HealthCare Strategies was not in any position to support them. In industrythere is no compromise on security and availability of the data.

A big task is ahead for the IT Department at HealthCare Strategies, was to restart all the services and functionalities according to their needs and priorities, and need to develop and implement a Business Continuity Plan (BCP).You as member of IT department, have three weeks' time to overcome these issues, by coming out with a strategy, putting into a plan, providing testing schedules, setting up implementation strategies and eventually documenting a project close-out to ensure project reappraisal had been done to deem the project being successfully completed.

Learning Outcomes: At the end of this project, students should be able to:

• Evaluate the corporate functions according to their needs and requirements.

• Coming up with a comprehensive BCP plan covering all aspects of corporate to fully functionalize its activities and processes based on their priorities.

• Justify whether you require another site to shift your corporate operations temporarily or you need to setup a new site permanently.

Individual Deliverables (Research & Documentation by individual member)

1. Evaluate the corporate operations and functions according to their needs and requirements and setup a plan mentioning most critical to less critical operations to run your corporate function properly to satisfy its customers.

2. Coming up with a comprehensive, BCP plan covering all aspects of corporate to fully functionalize its activities and processes based on their priorities set in step 1.

3. Justify whether you require another site to shift your corporate operations temporarily or you need to setup a new site permanently.

Notes:

All above deliverables should include proper evaluation and justification.

Use appropriate diagrams or other details wherever possible to illustrate your justifications and explanations.

Deliverables

• Your areas of responsibility must be managed and organized per the deliverables with each member of a group being responsible for one of the deliverables stated above.

• These areas of responsibilities must be provided in a summarized workload and marking matrix, indicating each individual members in the team. The matrix table should be available in the beginning of the report.

• The separate individual sections of the deliverables should be clearly separated by a section dividing sheet that clearly indicates the author of that section.

• Each individual section must use proper citing techniques and have a separate research references list/bibliography etc. at the end of that section

• Your report(s) must combine all the deliverables in one coherent document.