Continuity Management: Preserving Corporate Knowledge and Productivity When Employees Leave

Chapter 6. Six Steps to Continuity Management

Suggest an idea and you end up being the one instructed to do something about it. On your own time, of course, as if you weren't already completely loaded with things to do. I knew all about the "volunteer and you're it" phenomenon at WedgeMark when it was time to propose continuity management officially. I wasn't concerned that it would fall into my lap, however; I even welcomed it. There was something about continuity management that inspired me, if that's not too strong a word. It took me back to an earlier time when there weren't as many layoffs and people got excited about projects and wanted to do something meaningful and got a bunch of other enthusiasts together to help them do it.

Once our continuity management inquiry was officially recognized, more people joined us and KC Prime's size made it unwieldy as a think tank. So we divided it into prime teams, each with a set of responsibilities. Although officially sanctioned, KC Prime remained informal and somewhat irreverent. The first item on the agenda was planning, so we elected Cheryl Supreme Continuity Planner of the United States and put her in charge of it. Cheryl's planning team promptly met (out of spite, we think), and, after a period of time, developed a reasonable and generally coherent plan for implementing continuity management at WedgeMark.

I sat in as a member of Cheryl's planning team from the beginning. It was one of the most important of the teams we created out ...