business continuity plan telecommunication

Understanding the Succession Planning Process

The process by which you train and prepare employees to fill crucial roles within an organization is known as succession planning. This process ensures that the business continues its day-to-day operations as usual. This article will highlight the steps in the succession planning process.

No matter the type or size of your organization, succession planning is essential to continue to have your business run smoothly upon your departure. It’s important to identify your successor well in advance so that they may be properly trained for the role. This training may occur years in advance of the anticipated exit from the company. You may identify someone who needs to start at a lower position within the company and work their way up through the ranks to achieve a thorough training and knowledge base or you may have to cross-train them for several different roles.

Identify the Positions Needing Successors

Although succession planning usually refers to high-leadership roles in a company, it can apply to other roles as well. One of the first steps in this process is to recognize which roles within your company will need a successor if the current employee leaves. You’ll want to analyze which positions impact the revenue or growth of the company. This profit could be compromised if a successor is not put into place.

Informing Key Players

You’ll want to have a discussion with all the key players, those currently in a role identified as needing a successor and those who you would like to groom to take the role over. You should make sure that everyone is agreeable and on the same page. The current employee should be willing to train their successor so that a seamless transition can take place once the time comes. The person identified as the successor should be motivated to learn the role they will step into one day and a timeline should be established. Typically these identified successors feel an increase of pride and a greater investment in the company, according to The Balance website.

Internal vs. External Successors

Identifying an internal successor has multiple benefits. They know the company’s culture, have a sense of loyalty from currently working there and have been through the basic training program. In addition, they know colleagues internally and may also know some of the external clients as well. In cases where a suitable internal employee can’t be identified, an external one may have to be. This will entail more effort and time to be invested in finding and training a suitable candidate.

Succession Planning Benefit

Succession planning is a key necessity in running an efficient business. You want to have a plan for the future of the company, and identifying and training successors to step into key roles will ensure that your organization doesn’t miss a beat.

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Business Continuity Plan Template for Telecommunications

What is a Business Continuity Plan for Telecommunications?

A Business Continuity Plan for Telecommunications is a plan designed to ensure the resilience of communication networks, infrastructure, and services during emergencies or disruptions. It outlines strategies to reduce the risks of disruption, minimize downtime, and establish backup services for when disruptions occur. The plan should be tailored to the specific needs and requirements of a telecommunications company or service provider.

What's included in this Business Continuity Plan for Telecommunications template?

• 3 focus areas
• 6 objectives

Each focus area has its own objectives, projects, and KPIs to ensure that the strategy is comprehensive and effective.

Who is the Business Continuity Plan for Telecommunications template for?

The Business Continuity Plan for Telecommunications template is specifically designed for telecommunications companies and service providers. It provides them with a comprehensive framework to create their own business continuity plans. The template outlines the focus areas, objectives, actions, and measurable targets needed to ensure the resilience of communication networks, infrastructure, and services during emergencies or disruptions.

1. Define clear examples of your focus areas

Focus areas are the primary areas of concern that need to be addressed in the plan. For example, when creating a business continuity plan for telecommunications, the focus areas may include ensuring the resilience of communications infrastructure, network services, and telecommunications services. For each focus area, objectives, actions, and measurable targets must be defined.

2. Think about the objectives that could fall under that focus area

Objectives are the desired outcomes that must be achieved in order to reach the focus area goal. For example, an objective under the focus area of “Ensure Resilience of Communications Infrastructure” could be “Develop and Implement a Disaster Recovery Plan”.

3. Set measurable targets (KPIs) to tackle the objective

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are measurable targets that can be used to measure the progress of an objective. For example, when developing and implementing a disaster recovery plan, the KPI could be “Reduce downtime during emergency events” with an initial value of 72 hours and a target value of 24 hours.

4. Implement related projects to achieve the KPIs

Projects (also known as actions) are the steps needed to achieve the KPIs. For example, when developing and implementing a disaster recovery plan, the project could be “Research, Design, and Develop a Disaster Recovery Plan.”

5. Utilize Cascade Strategy Execution Platform to see faster results from your strategy

Cascade is a strategy execution platform that helps organizations and teams track their progress and results as they work towards their objectives. With Cascade, teams can easily manage their business continuity plan, track progress, and see faster results from their strategy.

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Teleconvergence is a small, independent communications consulting firm located in Portland, Oregon, serving clients at startups through middle-sized organizations anywhere in English and Spanish.   We have a business, not a technical orientation, helping clients manage system change and relocation, reduce costs, improve productivity, and plan for the future. We accept no commissions; all our revenue comes from our clients.

We're system, vendor, and technology — including VoIP — agnostic, with expertise in marketing, telecom, and strategic operations.  We advise companies regarding the telecom business, both startups and existing players, as well as IT shops looking to add telecom to their line cards, providing industry clients with strategic results that drive new revenue streams and create sustainable competitive positioning.  Please see our FAQ for more details.

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Business Continuity: Why Telecoms are Vital to Disaster Planning

Possible Consequences

Unless they have a robust continuity plan in place, businesses hit by natural or manmade disasters can be left unable to fully function for days or even weeks at a time. How are staff to get to work? Is there an alternative office location? Can the key IT and telephony systems be duplicated at another location, or accessed remotely? Failure to have answers to questions like these and having an easy to follow disaster recovery plan can lead to days of lost business for call centres and other businesses whose income is heavily dependent on telephony.

When you consider the fragility of some of the technologies we rely on, it’s easy to see why so many businesses could be vulnerable. One downed telephone line can cut off an entire area and a power outage can hit multiple mobile infrastructure points at the same time, effectively disabling mobile communications. With extreme weather becoming more common place throughout the world, contingency planning for such scenarios (and a lot worse besides) is an essential part of growing a robust and future-proofed business.

Scales of Disaster

Bringing sustained wind speeds of 315 kph, Typhoon Yolanda wreaked huge destruction on the eastern part of the Philippines on November 2nd 2013. Some towns and villages were almost completely destroyed and vast areas were left without power or telecommunications of any sort. With both land and mobile telecommunications infrastructure devastated, communications were either lost entirely or became extremely limited. While the human cost was by far the most important consequence of Typhoon Yolanda, many businesses were devastatingly affected as a result.

While far smaller in overall scale, more local and targeted damage can also stop a business from fully functioning. Theft of copper from telephone networks, vandalism, or a network provider fault can all stop communications from working properly. Under prepared businesses will struggle in such cases.

Mitigating Strategies and Technologies

In such circumstances, what technologies are on offer to businesses that might be used to keep telephony up and running?

Voice Over IP (VOIP)

From the development of mass market VoIP services that used broadband internet, all the way to today’s corporate offerings than run specialised and powerful hardware appliances, VoIP offers a way to decentralise telecoms. Business users of VoIP can expect a high availability in the event of damage to their offices or to more general damage to a wider area. Assuming staff can get to a location with internet access, a laptop or smartphone may well be enough to have them making and receiving calls. While no system is totally fool proof, one of the attractions of VoIP is its location flexibility.

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)

Often sold as a replacement for ISDN, SIP uses business grade internet connections to join your phone system to the Public Telephone System via a ‘SIP Trunk’. Because of this, much of the call routing in and out of your business is done by the SIP provider, who are typically in a totally different physical location. Because of this, in the event of your premises being unreachable or there being some greater infrastructure damage at play, your SIP provider can reroute to another location. SIP trunking offers high flexibility in the event of a disaster and, while there might be some need make minor reconfigurations to telephone systems, offers the capability to provide disaster recovery options for your business telephony.

Multiple Phone Systems

If your business has two sites then the option of site to site connected phone systems exists. Even if you operate a single site, there are providers of hosted telephone systems that can set the same thing up. By having two physically distant but inter-connected phone systems, only part of your infrastructure is brought down in the event of an outage. With the correct planning much of the work of switching staff from one system to the other can be done quickly and with low impact. While it is unlikely that this strategy could provide 100% perfect resilience, it could go a long way to shielding a business from the full brunt of outages.

Whatever disaster recovery methods for telephony a company uses, the effectiveness of the whole recovery plan will have a massive impact on how well a company deals with the disaster. Do staff know where they should work from in the event of a DR plan being implemented, for example?

Disaster can strike your business at any time and in a variety of ways. Once an effective, well designed and professionally managed telephone system is in place, telephony disaster recovery can be made a whole lot easier and you can rest safe in the knowledge that a change in the weather doesn’t mean a change in your businesses fortunes.

Originally published Apr 23, 2015, updated Aug 12, 2020

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