The Strategy That Assumed Everyone Would Show Up
A city council's emergency management office has built a continuity strategy around relocating 220 staff to an alternate facility 14 km away. The alternate site is a leased conference center with 60 workstations and no secure network. The strategy assumes staff will self-deploy within 2 hours. A recent transport strike and a severe snow event have shown that staff cannot reliably reach the site; on the worst day, only 40 percent arrived within 4 hours. The council's critical services include benefits payments, social care intake, and a 24/7 control room. The BCMS is certified to a recognized standard, and the annual audit is in six weeks. The auditor has previously flagged 'strategy not validated against assumptions.'
1. Evaluate the relocation strategy against the assumptions it rests on.
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The strategy is a facility plan masquerading as a continuity strategy. It assumes people, transport, technology, and capacity - and at least three of those assumptions are false.
Assumption audit:
- People will self-deploy within 2 hours. Falsified by the snow event: 40 percent arrived within 4 hours. The 2-hour assumption is unsupported.
- Transport will be available. Falsified by the strike. The strategy has no transport contingency.
- The alternate site has capacity. 60 workstations for 220 staff is 27 percent capacity. Even full attendance cannot be accommodated.
- The alternate site has the technology. No secure network means benefits payments and social care intake - both handling personal data - cannot run there.
- The control room can relocate. A 24/7 control room generally cannot be run from a conference center; it needs continuous power, communications, and security.
Conclusion: The strategy does not deliver the continuity it claims. It meets neither the people nor the technology nor the capacity requirement for the critical services named.
Audit exposure: The auditor's prior finding stands. Presenting this strategy as validated would be indefensible; the honest position is that it is unvalidated and under revision.
2. What alternative strategy set should the council adopt, and how should it be validated?
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The strategy must shift from 'move everyone to one place' to 'keep critical services running wherever the work can be done.'
Alternative strategies:
- Distributed work. Enable remote access with secure connectivity for roles that can work remotely. This removes the transport dependency for a large share of the 220 staff.
- Split-site and shift-based operation. Rotate teams across locations to reduce the number who must travel at once, and to preserve separation during incidents.
- Prioritized service tiers. Define which services must run at full capacity (benefits payments, social care intake, control room) and which can be reduced. Allocate the scarce 60 workstations to the top tier only.
- Control room resilience. Keep the control room in a hardened primary location with a tested backup control room - not a conference center - with independent power and communications.
- Transport contingency. Pre-arranged transport, staff accommodation near the site, or volunteer/on-call rotas for essential roles.
- Mutual aid. Agreements with neighboring councils for surge capacity on benefits and social care intake.
Validation:
- Test the remote-access path at volume, not with 10 pilot users.
- Exercise a no-notice relocation with a measured time-to-operate for the top-tier services.
- Test the transport assumption explicitly (simulate the strike/snow condition).
- Record tested capability versus planned capability and report the gap to the audit committee before the audit, with a remediation plan.