Supply Chain questionnaire for Business Continuity

Submitted by Sara McKenna on Tue, 11/08/2011 - 05:42

In August 2011, Gayle Hedgecock was the guest speaker at BANG! During an entertaining evening, she posed the question: "Just how many Continuity questionnaires must I fill in each year?"

In her case, it was scores of the things; others were lucky and had fewer to do, but it became clear that ALL the questionnaires were different, even though in reality they were asking the same questions. It was just that the questions were phrased slightly differently, or were in a different order. In some cases, they were asking questions that had little relevance to Continuity...

So, on the 16th August, a group of thirteen respected Continuity professionals got together to try to make life just a tiny bit easier.

The plan was to produce a single Third Party Questionnaire, or 3PQ, that we just had to complete ONCE; the next time we were asked, we could just send a copy! Hurrah! Time saved! Frustration eliminated! Responsibility fulfilled!

Of course, such an endeavour required a team of folks willing to give their time to ensure that we reduced the number questions, kept the language cross-industry, while still ensuring that the maximum amount of required data would be available. No easy task, but we managed it. The resulting questionnaire may look simple, but it's the result of many, many hours of debate and discussion. We compiled a set of questions based on all the questionnaires we could lay our hands on, and then laboriously drilled through to see which were duplicates, which should be added, and which we felt were best left out. Quite how we've all remained sane and functional is a mystery!

Take a look at the results on our website (www.continuityforum.org). It's free, freely available, and fully editable. Add your own logo, include any links you think might be useful - but do please try to keep the questions in the same order, as this will ensure a degree of commonality.

On the 3PQ page, you'll find the document ready to download, in word format, if you want to make changes, and in an interactive PDF. We're officially launching 3PQ at BCM World on Wednesday - come along and meet us.

We hope you'll find the 3PQ useful, and that you'll tell your colleagues and peers about it. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to contact me.

If you have ideas or thoughts on a project that would create Continuity and build Resilience do get in touch and we'll see how we can help.