Why do UW departments need a continuity plan?
The goal of UW’s continuity planning is to ensure that the University can function and provide essential services by reducing or eliminating the impacts of disruptions.
Disruptions to academics, research and administrative units can happen at any time. A disruption is any event that may inhibit the normal operations of the university—such as a cyber incident, winter storms, an infectious disease outbreak, earthquake or utility outage. More often disruptions occur on a small scale – a flood in a building caused by a broken pipe; construction limiting building access; or a large group of people making significant noise.
Continuity planning involves identifying a department’s key processes and the resources needed to support them, then developing action plans for continued operations using workarounds or alternatives.
UW continuity plans identify:
- Key business processes are the things a department does, such as classroom instruction, lab-based learning, communications, hiring or cleaning buildings.
- Resource dependencies are things a department needs for the processes, such as equipment, staff, technology and facility needs.
- Timelines to indicate how long a process or dependency can be interrupted before there is a serious impact to the Universities finances, reputation, operations, legal requirements or overall strategy. For instance, how long can a research unit operate without power for a freezer?
It’s essential every UW department in Seattle, Bothell and Tacoma have its own plan to keep the University’s business, academic, and research operations going without losing valuable data, revenue or reputation. All University administrative, research and academic units are required to have a continuity plan in place to support restoring operations after a major disruption to be compliant with UW Administrative Policy Statement 13.2.
With guidance from the BARC program and direction from department leadership, teams work together to identify key processes and workarounds. Teams know their work best and are the best people to determine how to get back to work.
The BARC program is here to support departments during the planning process.
There are many options to help you kick start, review or revise your plans, including:
- Training on how to navigate and use the online Husky Ready tool.
- Sharing tips and guidance on continuity planning best practices.
- Providing presentations and facilitated discussions to help create team buy-in and begin the planning process.
- Facilitating discussions and exercises of your existing plans.
- Providing review and feedback for your plans, at any stage in the process.
- Supporting your planning in other ways as requested.
What does continuity mean for my area?
An ongoing planning process to ensure that the necessary steps are taken to identify the impact of potential losses, maintain viable recovery strategies and recovery plans, and continuity of services for all business and administrative units. Business continuity promotes pre-event decision making to address operational disruptions, including working with limited staff, loss of facilities and loss of systems.
An ongoing planning process to ensure that instruction continues after a disruptive incident. Academic continuity is intended to reduce disruptions in the faculty’s ability to provide instruction and the student’s ability to receive instruction. Academic continuity promotes principles that provide graduate students with assurances that their work will be safe and available to them in the event of a campus disruption. The UW’s Center for Teaching and Learning has a guide with resources that can be developed prior to any campus disruption that provides a number of practical options available to teaching staff should the UW suspend normal operations.
Research continuity is the process of ensuring that research projects will endure after a disruption in services. This is done by planning and mitigation steps that protect the researcher, data, research subjects, equipment, records and critical supplies that may be impacted by a disruption. A disruption in services may include events such as a power failure, communication disruptions or an inability to access your workplace due to safety or transportation issues.
The UW’s Environmental Health & Safety department provides guidance on continuity planning for labs.