Business Continuity Plan Development

A major technology transformation is one of the highest-risk periods in a utility's operational life. The moment you cut over to a new system, your organization is simultaneously operating unfamiliar software, running on migrated data, relying on newly trained staff, and doing it all while serving customers who expect uninterrupted service. A Business Continuity Plan is not optional during this period — it is the operational safety net that keeps a system failure from becoming a service failure.

Transformation-Specific BCP Development

Generic business continuity frameworks are not adequate for a technology cutover. Conduit develops transformation-specific BCPs that address the particular failure scenarios relevant to your program: system unavailability, data integrity failures, integration outages, rollback scenarios, and extended hypercare disruptions. We build plans from the operational ground up — identifying the critical functions that must be preserved, the manual procedures that will replace system-supported ones, and the decision authority that governs when and how to invoke continuity measures.

Critical Function Identification

Not all utility operations are equally time-sensitive. Emergency dispatch, safety operations, and same-day service restoration have continuity requirements that differ fundamentally from billing cycle processing or customer correspondence. We systematically identify your organization's critical functions, define acceptable disruption thresholds for each, and build continuity procedures calibrated to those thresholds — rather than applying a one-size approach that either over-prepares for low-stakes functions or under-prepares for the ones that matter most.

Manual Procedure Development

When systems fail, people revert to what they know. If manual procedures are not documented, practiced, and accessible, they will be improvised under pressure — with predictable results. Conduit develops the specific manual procedures your staff will need to execute critical functions when the system is unavailable: paper-based work orders, manual dispatch protocols, offline billing processes, and customer communication procedures. These are written for the people who will use them, not for a compliance filing.

Rollback Planning

Every go-live should have a credible rollback plan. The decision to roll back a system implementation is one of the most difficult a utility leader will face — and it should not be made in the middle of a crisis without a defined process, established criteria, and pre-authorized decision authority. We build rollback plans that specify the triggering conditions, the sequence of steps, the data implications, and the communication protocols. A rollback plan that exists only in theory is not a plan.

BCP Testing and Validation

A continuity plan that has never been tested has an unknown probability of working when it is needed. Conduit facilitates tabletop exercises and operational drills that test your BCP against realistic scenarios — identifying gaps in the procedures, clarifying ambiguities in the decision-making authority, and building the muscle memory your staff will need in an actual disruption. Testing before cutover is exponentially cheaper than discovering plan gaps during one.