Episode Summary:

Shane starts a series of interviews with business & operational leaders who had no previous business continuity experience and were thrust into launching a work from home strategy in not-so-ideal circumstances. Anitha Abraham is a leader of a Medical Center business unit with tasks that were entirely office based. Listen as she describes the actions she had to take (without any BC planning) to get her team working from home and continuing her vital tasks.

This story highlights the importance of having a resource with operational understanding assigned to help with crafting a BC strategy and that many people do not have automatically have the technology or a work process that will work from home!

Key Points

1:49min- Anitha's job and the role of her team

4:10min- When she first started to feel the impacts of the pandemic

6:13min- How much time she had to develop a work from home strategy

8:29min- Interlude- Shane's thoughts on Anitha's situation from the BC Manager perspective

9:41min- Impacts of shifting to WFH

12:10min- How she began to develop her WFH processes

14:30min- Developing the IT and process cheat sheet for her team

16:45min- Dealing with transfer of work product between team members during the lock down

18:45min- Changes to technology or equipment necessary for this change

20:48min- Lessons learned and the need to plan earlier

22:19min- Impacts to productivity because of the change to the process

25:40min- Shane's lessons learned from this situation.

Guest Bio:

Anitha Abraham began her career as a Neonatal Intensive Care Nurse. After 5 years, she joined the Ob/Gyn research team at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, TX where she now serves as the supervisor.

Links:

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Meditation for the week of October 18, 2020