How It Enabled Daitan to Pivot a Global Workforce Without Any Disruption to Customers Amid COVID-19

Introduction

Every CEO understands the importance of Business Continuity Planning (BCP). It is a standard best practice and essential to ensuring your business continues without disruption despite  “unforeseen” threats or disasters.

Business Continuity Planning is the process of creating systems of prevention and recovery to deal with potential threats to a company

Solid Business Continuity planning is exactly how Daitan was able to immediately react to the threat of COVID-19. Within hours we fully pivoted our entire workforce (across 2 continents) to working safely at home and without any disruption to customers. 

Keeping employees safe is the priority along with enabling them to have the right tools and access to seamlessly continue working.  Because Daitan’s culture puts People First, we put additional communication and outreach measures into place to further protect their health and well being. 

In addition, our Business Continuity planning anticipates our customers’ potential need for added software engineering capacity in the event their organizations are impacted. 

We were prepared with communication channels to ensure everyone — customers and employees—understood our actions and to reassure them about our ability to fully operate without any disruption.  We maintain daily communications to keep all stakeholders apprised of the latest developments, as well as facilitating their input and feedback. In fact, it’s been very heartening to hear Daitan customers express their confidence in us because of our rapid, thorough response. 

There are lots of moving parts to our BC plan, and compliance and legal considerations vary by geography. But when the moment came to execute, Daitan’s entire organization stepped up to do their part and everything went smoothly.  As CEO, I am very proud of everyone.  

In this article I’d like to share a little about our approach to Business Continuity because having this plan enabled us to respond in real-time and, for the foreseeable future, continue to sustain all operations without any disruption.

Business Continuity is More Than a Plan, It Represents True Resiliency

At Daitan, resiliency is part of our core Principles & Values and as an organization, we look at everything through the lens of building for maximum resiliency.  This mindset is part of how we future proof ourselves against the unforeseen, but inevitable, challenges that will arise. Resiliency is a wonderful characteristic and underscores our intention to build—everything from software products to employee and customer relationships—for the long-term.  

Our Approach to Business Continuity Planning

For Daitan, Business Continuity Planning is much more than just our facility or infrastructure because ensuring no disruption to customers meant knowing how to pivot all engineering teams into remote working with seamless software development workflow and agile communication. Our plan needed to account for every employee’s function and how they would sustainably operate, as well as ensuring that every customer’s needs are factored into our response.  We expanded leadership communications across the organization not only about work, but also ensuring they have access to the right information regarding the threat (in this case COVID-19); and, we encourage sharing feedback so all are participating together. Added communication and outreach are vital to ensuring individual well being and health. Because we laid the groundwork, we were able to pivot our entire workforce in hours—ensuring their safety, well being and continuity of work.

Second, Daitan’s BCP has been integral to the company for years and enables us to understand scenarios and impact on everything from facilities, systems and processes; to people, regulatory compliance and communications.  A key component of this “intelligence” includes Daitan’s Management System (DMS), which is an internally developed, company-wide management solution that captures the complete view — from initial engagement with potential customers, to interviewing new recruits and career planning; to comprehensive project management and secure communication. This system is a real-time window in all aspects of our business relationship and ensures we remain highly responsive to every customer’s needs.

Having this caliber of visibility exposed areas where we began to take action by embedding underlying changes and investments we would need in place to achieve continuity without disruption. For example, we have a large engineering workforce that not only account for client projects, but our own resources. These added resources include our own internal engineers, first-year engineers and interns that work at Daitan. We also have an Innovation engineering team, as well as a large team of senior engineers, architects and data scientists, that provide oversight to our customer projects. This investment does 2 things, it enables us to provide 10% additional capacity to client projects at no cost. It also provides capacity that can stand ready to enable any client to maintain their development objectives even in the face of a threat like COVID-19.

Third, we test, learn and test again to be sure our plan is resilient, compliant with regulations, and capable of implementation on a moment’s notice—as was the case with COVID-19.  We have learned a great deal by living this experience and will undoubtedly continue to adapt and optimize our plan. 

Finally, think of your Business Continuity Plan as a living part of the company. A part that your entire organization understands and cares about in the “normal times,” in order to prevail in the difficult times. 

Yes, There Will Be a Next Time

For every executive, the core risk to business is disruption, which can take many forms — from natural disasters to pandemics. If I can impart any wisdom, it would be to take Business Continuity Planning very seriously because there is a lot at stake when you consider the economic and human toll that is unfolding before us as the threat of COVID-19 continues.

Acknowledgement: Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán from Pexels