Shades of Orange

Posted February 4, 2021

by cliff

Well, the new year has come and if you are like me, that means it’s time to update the Business Continuity Plan before the annual ISO22301 audit.  This is never an easy task, but this year is going to be particularly difficult.  The COVID-19 pandemic changed a lot.  Don’t get me wrong, we had pandemic as one of the scenarios in our BCP and we activated our plan even before the Circuit Breaker was announced.  But, putting the plan into action in a quickly evolving health and regulatory environment was a real eye opener.

Last year, I found out Zoom is an essential service. I also found out that my employees work pretty well from home and now I have way too much office space.  My customer’s don’t really need to see me or have my engineers onsite unless they are delivering hardware. And, I would now consider a good VPN and 2FA system to be critical infrastructure. On the positive side, I found out that saving 1.5 hours of commute time every day means I can get more sleep and duck out to the gym before dinner. Even if I now eat lunch at my desk while I work, it’s still a good trade in my opinion.

Those of you who also have to write BCP plans, were probably as surprised as I was that DORSCON Orange comes in different shades.  Not literally of course, but it does seem that as Singapore transitioned from DORSCON Orange (Circuit Breaker) to DORSCON Orange (Phase 1,2, and 3), we went from a dark ominous orange to a more salmon mousse kind of orange.

The old pandemic plan and staff segregation list have to be completely rewritten. There aren’t just four DORSCON colours anymore.  There are now multiple shades and slightly different operating procedures for each.  So, now you know what I’ll be busy doing for the next few days.