The best way of preparing a business impact assessment is to start with first identifying the risks, then once identified the next step is to identify how these would affect specific business operations.

For example when I joined Bourne Steel I identified that the company had no buffer stock which meant that if there was a fault on CAD machine, a draughtsman could be prevented from working on the project on average this could be as much as one day as new parts would have to be purchased delivered.

The cost back in 2001 based on an 8 hour working day would be something like £100, plus the cost in overtime to catch up on the time that was lost £150; that is £250 without bringing any other factors into the equation. At that time the CAD machine was only £800 which means that in in less than four such incidents the buffer machine would have more than paid for itself.

At the same time of creating the business case to implement the use of buffer machines, I also made a case for purchasing Norton Ghost. Building images of complex CAD builds meant that I could deliver a CAD workstation within 20 minutes rather than taking 4 hours.

I am often shocked when I find myself in the situation such as below.

Senior User has a laptop it was built with only a 20GB partition on system drive and now the user cannot work as he has no space available on this partition even after all the obvious steps had been taken to reduce the usage on the c drive such as moving page files, temp folder, his documents etc.

Now I can think of 3 practical resolutions for this scenario.

• Swap out laptop with an identical laptop transfer data = cost data transfer time
• Swap hard disk with a pre built image and transfer data = cost data transfer time plus replacement hard disk and installation
• Repartition hard disk using third party tool = cost software plus time taken to repartition

This company do not use partitioning software nor plan too, they also do not have buffer stock and nor do they follow the ITIL practice of carrying spares, I was told there is no budget! Both these gentlemen probably cost the company within 30 minutes the cost of a replacement hard disk, but because of the builds of these two laptops I had to make the different decisions, both of which were far from ideal. In one case I uninstalled the largest programs and reinstalled them onto the other unused partition this provided him with a temporary fix and got him working again but the process cost 2 hours. The second case meant that I had to back up his data to another computer before I could rebuild the laptop and transfer his data across, the time taken 5 hours.

When people tell that there is no budget maybe they should do an impact assessment.

1. REVENUE: Direct loss, compensatory payment, lost future revenues, billing losses and investment losses
2. PRODUCTIVITY: Number employee x impacted x hours out x burdened hours =? DAMAGED
3. REPUTATION: Customers, competitors gain advantage, suppliers, financial markets, business partners
4. FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE: Revenue recognition, cash flow, credit rating, stock price, regulatory fines.