Starting a Disaster recovery (DR) project is no small task. Disaster recovery planning is complicated and multi-disciplinary. It's likely to be one of the larger projects that most organizations undertake, and it brings together many people who don't normally associate with each other. For these and other reasons, you need many important resources before you start a DR project:
- Executive sponsorship: A senior manager or executive who's willing to go on record to say, “Disaster recovery planning is so important that we need to complete it by this date.” In other words, you need to find someone who's willing to put their money where their mouth is!
- Budget: In the early stages of a DR project, you need money for a project manager, technology experts, process experts, or supplemental help for departments as they divert resources away from their usual business to the DR project. In the later stages of the project, you spend money on technology improvements that you need to support recovery objectives.
- Project manager: You need a strong project manager for a multidisciplinary project that can involve dozens of people or more, such as disaster recovery planning. You can have a part-time or full-time project manager, depending on the number of people and activities involved.
- Subject matter experts: You need experts in the business processes that the organization has in play, particularly those processes that earn revenue or service customers. You also need technology experts who understand the IT applications and infrastructure that support those processes.
- People with writing skills: Later phases of DR projects require people who can write processes and procedures in a way that anyone can understand. You never know who might end up on a disaster response team.
A typical DR project can take anywhere from three months (for the smallest organization) to well over a year to complete. How quickly you get a DR plan in place depends on how high a priority you need to make it and how much extra money you have available for outside help. If you really don't have a good handle on the amount of resources that you may need for your project, here are a couple of suggestions:
- Hire a consultant. Bring in an experienced DR consultant, just for a short term engagement (no more than a few days), to have a look around and give you some thumbnail estimates on project sizing. A consultant who says he or she needs a month to give you these estimates either doesn't understand that you want only rough estimates or just wants the billable hours.
- Develop an interim DR plan. You should develop an interim DR plan, anyway, but by writing this plan, you can get additional exposure on the number of critical processes, systems, suppliers, and so on in your business. That information can help you estimate the size and scope of the real DR plan.
