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How do we help existing teams become sustainable?
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How can we help teams be prepared to cope with disaster?
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There are lots of ways to help, here is one.
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/download/2488
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/download/2489
Here are two papers that offer some ideas on this. One is a white paper that is a business plan and team continuity plan. The other is a PowerPoint of a presentation given at the 2009 CHP.
Continuity Plans are common in big businesses and usually focus on big events and how the business will deal with them. These plans might include weather issues (hurricane, tornado, flood), attacks, impairment of key leaders. They might also include items like loss of a computer network, corruption of data, or failure of a major supplier or customer. Companies then put together plans to address the issues that can be addressed. This might include giving everyone a laptop so they could work at home, having a backup computer system in another location, restrictions on how many executives can fly together, having a big line of credit at the bank, etc. All are meant to allow the business to sustain itself if some sort of major event happens.
For a FIRST team, the same process can be put in place. Teams can consider the issues that put them at risk. This might be loss of a key mentor, loss of a key sponsor, loss of their school, some socially unacceptable event that occurs that threatens the stability of the team, etc. I can name several teams that have faced these occurrences in the past 2 years.
The next step is to identify the likelihood and impact of some of these bad things happening. Some might be unlikely, some might be very likely. Some may have no real impact, others could have a huge impact. Then, the team can identify what actions can be taken to either minimize the likelihood or reduce the impact of the top items. Sometimes, there is really no action the team can take and they just have to assume the risk.
The final steps are then to put the plans in place, and to comtinually review the issues and risks.
We did this last year and modeled our process after a corporate template from one of the team mentors.
This activity takes time and effort, and can be a challenge for teams because it has nothing to do with building a robot. It is a different type of activity. And, most of us don't like to think about what can go wrong.
Some of the risks we identified included:
Loss of a key mentor (has happened)
Loss of our school build space (at risk every new year)
Loss of a major sponsor (always a potential)
Loss of all major sponsors (lower risk, but disasterous)
Loss of our teacher leader (has happened twice)
Major injury in our machine shop (not gonna say)
We did this last fall, but we need to repeat it this fall and be sure we are current and have identified any new concerns. A continuity plan is a "living document".