We all want to be effective business continuity/disaster recovery professionals, right? While there's no silver bullet, there are some characteristics that successful professionals share. In fact, there are four consistent behaviors I have found in top quality BC/DR professionals in my many years in the profession. Documenting these behaviors is intended to fuel your self-reflection, thought process, and discussion among friends and colleagues - with the ultimate goal of motivating of becoming an even more effective contingency planning professional.

Begin with the end in mind.

Successful leaders, in any profession, have a clear vision of where they want to go and how to get there. For BC/DR professionals, the challenge is to match the vision for their area of responsibility with the corporate vision. What is the vision for your business continuity program? Beginning with the end in mind means identifying where it is your program needs to go and developing a roadmap to get there. In this context, a roadmap should depict a series of logical portions of the overall effort and interdependencies. Additional detail and documentation should describe tasks, resources, target dates, and responsibilities.

Be proactive.

Too often, programs only are enhanced following a disruptive event or an audit. Don't wait. Anticipate. Find the flaws in the plan and fix them before an event occurs. Review the plan from the perspective of the most critical auditor/examiner, or better yet the customer, and make adjustments.

Be aware of your environment.

Continuity planning is a business issue. Understand the business environment your company operates in as well as all current and potential regulations. Be aware of threats and risks to your facility, technology, and business processes. Take actions to mitigate, assign, or accept those risks. Know which agencies you need to interface with during an event. Understand their expectations and requirements. Include public sector agencies in exercises. And stay on top of best practices in business continuity, disaster recovery, and incident management. Applying best practices will increase the viability of your program and, ultimately, enhance shareholder value. Pay attention to recent disruptions and learn from them. History can be a great teacher.

Be prepared for the real recovery.

It may not always be possible to conduct a test without negatively impacting production processing or the workflow of business operations. But unless you exercise the plan the way your company would recover from an outage, you may not be prepared. When the disaster occurs, you may need to execute all aspects of the plan simultaneously. Will you have all the resources to do so? Will the resources available be able to perform the full load of work in the same amount of time that they performed a portion of the work during the exercise?

To ensure recovery timeframes can be met, work toward exercising as much of the plan as possible simultaneously, because that is what you will have to do. Stop preparing for the test and start preparing for the disaster by reducing exercise preparation windows. I realize that every exercise can't be completely unannounced - like many business disruptions are - but by always taking weeks to prepare for an exercise, you aren't preparing realistically.

Two other factors contributing to preparedness are training/awareness programs and plan update procedures. Your training plan should include regular reviews of the plan, along with dialogue to ensure processes, roles, and responsibilities are understood. I recommend that you involve your suppliers in the training activities as well. Keeping the plan current is an obvious requirement. How prepared would you be if contact information or procedures were outdated?

As a profession, we are getting better at preparing for events that cause our businesses to alter the location of where we do our work. We have had a lot of experience at it. Maybe it's because of all that experience that, sometimes, we lose sight of simple principles or behaviors that make us successful as leaders and planners. Planning is not just about following a checklist of preparation activities. It is more about being on top of things before events occur. And being an effective BC/DR professional is not just about what you do, but about what you are prepared to do.

Peter Laz, CBCP, is a senior business continuity consultant with Forsythe Solutions Group.