Critical tasks
List the work whose delay creates immediate client, payroll, legal, safety, or operational consequences.
Continuity readiness
Prepare the decisions your team will need during an interruption.
Continuity is not a promise that nothing will fail. It is the practical ability to identify what matters, reach the right people, use approved access, understand dependencies, and choose a safe next action when normal work is disrupted.
Name the work that cannot drift
Begin with client and operational activities, then trace the technology they depend on.
Dependencies
Connect each task to people, Microsoft 365 services, devices, Internet, applications, vendors, and physical locations.
Acceptable workaround
Decide whether a temporary manual or alternate path exists and who can authorize its use.
Make ownership reachable
A technically correct plan fails when nobody knows who can approve the next step.
Decision owners
Name business owners for downtime, cost, access, communications, and vendor escalation.
Provider routes
Keep current support entitlements and non-secret contact routes in a controlled business record.
Access discipline
Do not put passwords in the plan. Record where approved emergency access is governed and who can authorize its use.
Practice a bounded scenario
A short tabletop conversation can expose missing decisions without inventing a score.
Scenario
Choose one plausible interruption such as unavailable Internet, a lost device, inaccessible shared files, or a key vendor outage.
Sequence
Walk through detection, internal communication, owner decision, vendor action, workaround, validation, and closure.
Improve
Assign each gap to a person and review date. Larger recovery testing, formal risk analysis, and compliance evidence need separate scope.
Prepare this
A useful conversation starts with simple facts.
- Three business tasks that matter first
- Decision owners and alternates
- Technology and vendor dependencies
- Approved workaround or stop-work decision
- A date to review gaps and ownership
Continue
Continue your decision
Bring the context; keep credentials out of the message.
Book a white-glove introPrepare a useful introduction
Describe the interruption, the change ahead, and how your team prefers to be kept informed. A short note is enough to begin a service-fit conversation.