Your First Business Continuity Drill Before a Sri Lanka Team Goes Live

Run your first Sri Lanka business continuity drill before the team goes live. A 90-minute tabletop exercise covering power failure, internet loss, data unavailability and staff who cannot reach the office is enough. The test is not whether systems fail over. It is whether every scenario has a named decision-maker, a notification route and a degraded way to keep working.

The office is leased. The laptops have arrived. Your first hires have signed and are sitting at their desks, and you are about to send the "we are live" email. Before you send it, spend one morning walking through what happens on a bad day. Clients rarely judge a new team on speed first; they judge it on how fast it reacts when something breaks. And the first time something really breaks, the default reaction is usually everyone asking each other who owns the problem.

Which four scenarios should you drill before going live?

Do not try to cover every risk at once. Lock these four down first, because they tend to arrive together and they test coordination more than technical skill.

Power failure. The question is not whether you have a UPS. It is what is actually plugged into it. Plenty of new offices back up the servers and nothing else — routers, switches, door access and the attendance terminal stay on mains. When the power drops, the network dies first, and nobody knows how long the backup will last. List your equipment, then ask the supplier how each item behaves and how long it runs on battery. Do not fill the sheet in from memory.

Internet loss. Is there a second line? Is it a different carrier or the same one? Can mobile signal on your floor carry a video call? Confirm this with your carriers and building management before drill day, not during it.

Data unavailable. You can still log in, but key files will not open, the shared drive will not connect, customer tickets are not arriving. This is the scenario teams skip, because nothing shows on a normal day. Answer one concrete question: if a system is unusable today, who has the authority to say "we pause this", and who tells the customer?

Staff who cannot reach the office. Heavy rain, a blocked road, suspended public transport — or a critical role that only one person knows how to do. Same problem underneath. Go role by role and ask who else can cover it, then flag every single-person dependency.

Attendance and pay during a shutdown or a day an employee cannot reach the office sit in labour law. Work from the latest requirements published by Sri Lanka's Department of Labour and from what your contracts say, and send individual cases to a qualified professional.

Which drill format should you use?

The first drill does not need to be realistic to the point of hurting. When it is, the cost usually lands on your clients and your own staff.

Format	When it fits	What it costs	Effect on your launch schedule	What it cannot cover
Tabletop exercise	Team just assembled, service commitments not yet in a measured period	Half a day, a handful of people, no production systems touched	Almost none — it can run a week before launch	Does not prove a system can actually fail over
Single-point failover test	You have a list of critical systems and suppliers willing to help	Needs a booked window with the supplier, possibly outside working hours	Small, but schedule it in advance	Does not cover staff availability or the decision chain
Full live exercise	You have firm service level commitments and need to show clients	Highly visible to clients, heaviest coordination, pulls in several departments	Large — not a first attempt	Run it first and the exercise becomes a real incident

One line for deciding: the goal of the first drill is to find the places where nobody is in charge, not to prove the systems are solid. A tabletop gets you there.

Which starting point fits your team?

Contact centre or shared services team. Once service level commitments are live, your recovery-time promises carry a price. Run a tabletop plus a single-point failover on critical systems, and put the client communication script in writing: who notifies the client, in which minute, using what wording, promising what. Those clauses usually sit at contract level — have a legal professional review them first.

A few expatriate leads and a small local team. A tabletop is enough. Focus on two things: no critical role should depend on one person, and if the expatriate lead cannot be reached, who is authorised to decide on site. If the second one is not written down, it does not exist.

Factory or warehouse team. Run continuity alongside the physical risks of the site itself — power, drainage, logistics disruption. For the order to check those in, see our earlier pieces on verifying flood risk, drainage responsibility and shutdown planning before leasing a factory, and on checking heavy-rain power cuts and network outages before renting an office in Sri Lanka.

How do you run a 90-minute tabletop drill?

• 0–10 min: Set the rules. This is not about assigning blame; it is about finding gaps in the process.
• 10–30 min: Scenario one. The facilitator reads the situation — for example, "at 10:00 the whole floor loses power and the backup only covers the servers." Participants answer in their real roles: what you do first, who you contact, when the client hears about it.
• 30–50 min: Scenarios two and three, same rhythm.
• 50–70 min: Staff cannot reach the office. Each critical role owner names their backup out loud, on the spot.
• 70–90 min: Capture every question nobody could answer, turn it into an action list, and give each item one owner and one place to confirm it.

You do not have to finish every scenario. Where the discussion stalls, that stall is a finding.

Why isn't the drill an IT job?

A common assumption is that a continuity drill is IT switching over to a backup line. In practice the decision chain usually fails first: who can declare "we are not serving clients today", who can approve an emergency purchase, who makes the calls to clients. IT solves one slice of that.

The cost of the assumption shows up on the day it matters. The systems come back in ten minutes, but the client line rings for two hours, or a frontline employee makes a promise to a customer in good faith and you spend far longer explaining it afterwards.

What should you keep after the drill?

At least four documents, and they need to be reachable when power and internet are down — one printed copy, one offline copy.

1. Contact card: who is first contact in which situation, who is second, including suppliers and building management.
2. Decision authority sheet: which level of decision can be made by whom when the lead is unreachable.
3. Shutdown and degraded-service talking points: standard wording for staff and clients, so nobody improvises their own.
4. Open questions list: each line says who it goes to — carrier, equipment supplier, your bank, a professional firm, a government body.

The fourth one matters most. The value of the drill is not the day itself; it is closing those gaps within the following two weeks. Retention of statutory company records and compliance documents is governed by the latest requirements published by Sri Lanka's Registrar of Companies; arrangements involving cross-border data and system hosting need separate professional advice.

When do you need outside professional help?

If what you are drilling is a labour arrangement, a data compliance question, a licence-related shutdown, or the service level clauses in a client contract, you are outside internal project management territory. Those need a qualified professional's opinion. What outside support can usefully do is help you scope the requirement, sequence the document list and the people to confirm it with, coordinate a multi-party meeting and chase the open items — the conclusions themselves still come from a licensed professional.

This content is general information only and is not legal, tax or immigration advice. Specific requirements are governed by the latest positions of the relevant Sri Lankan authorities and your appointed licensed professional.