The building lost power at 6:15 on a Thursday morning, and the agency's continuity plan turned out to have been written for a different kind of organization.
It was a good plan in its way. Twelve pages, adopted two years earlier, covering data backup, an alternate work location, and a communications tree. Under the heading Resumption of Operations it described how the organization would return to normal service within five business days.
The difficulty was that forty-one children were in placement that morning, and their placements did not pause. Foster parents still needed to reach somebody. A hospital still needed an authorization. Two scheduled visits still had to happen or be documented as not having happened, which is its own kind of consequence. A worker halfway to a home visit needed to know whether to turn around.
None of that is resumption. All of it is Thursday.
Continuity for organizations that can stop, and for organizations that cannot
Most continuity planning material is written for an employer whose service can be suspended. If a firm cannot open on Thursday, the work waits until Friday, and the plan's job is to make Friday come sooner.
An agency with people in care has no such Friday. The obligation continues whether or not the office, the systems or the executive director are available, and that single fact changes what the document has to contain. A plan built around recovery time is answering the wrong question. The question is what happens during.
That is why the useful version starts from essential functions rather than from systems. Not "which server matters" but "which things must continue to happen even today, and how long can each one stop before somebody is harmed or a requirement is breached." Some functions can wait a week without consequence. A few cannot wait four hours. Sorting them is most of the work, and it is the part that cannot be borrowed from a template.
Succession three deep, and the licensed-role column
The other thing an agency in this position needs, which general continuity plans rarely carry, is succession that goes further than one name.
For every essential function, name three people who could perform it, in order. Two is not enough — the event that removes the first person is frequently the event that removes the second, because they were in the same building, at the same meeting, or on the same road.
Then add a column that most plans do not have: does this function require a person holding a specific license, approval or regulatory designation? Because if it does, the list of three is not a list of three colleagues. It is a list of people who hold that qualification, which may be shorter than you expect and may not include anybody currently on staff. What that requirement actually says is a matter for your licensing authority and your own counsel, and it is worth confirming in advance rather than at 6:15 on a Thursday.
The first seventy-two hours, hour by hour
The part of the plan people actually open is short and unglamorous: a grid covering the first three days, written so that somebody who did not write it can follow it.
Who is called, in what order, and on what number if the phone system is the thing that failed. Which functions run today, which are suspended, and who tells the people affected. Where the current placement roster lives if the case system is unreachable — and whether anybody has verified that copy exists in a form a person can read without the network. What gets documented as it happens, because the record of a disrupted week is the thing a monitor will ask for later, and it cannot be reconstructed afterward.
Write it for the deputy, not for the director. The plan is being read on a day when the person who understands the organization best is unreachable, which is the entire premise.
Then test it, or it is a document rather than a plan
A continuity plan that has never been exercised is a set of assumptions in a binder. The exercise does not need to be elaborate: sit six people in a room for ninety minutes, introduce one scenario, and work it through out loud. The value is in what the room discovers it does not know.
And the exercise only counts if it changes something. Record what it revealed and what was changed as a result, with a date. An exercise that changes nothing was a meeting.
What to do this month
List your essential functions — the things that must continue even during a disruption — and beside each one write the longest it could stop before somebody is harmed or a requirement is breached. Do not write recovery times for systems. Write them for obligations to people.
Anything with a tolerance measured in hours is where your plan needs to be specific, and that short list is almost certainly shorter than the plan you already have. Start there.
The continuity of operations plan and tabletop is on the Open Shelf: essential functions with recovery times, succession three deep with the licensed-role column, the seventy-two hour grid, the five losses, and the tabletop record. It carries no statutory notification deadlines by design — those depend on what you hold and where you operate. No registration, no email address.