T 0.33 Absence of Personnel

Absence of personnel can have a significant impact on an institution and its business processes. Staff may be missing unexpectedly due to illness, accident, death or strike, for example. Furthermore, also the predictable personnel absences in cases of leave, training or regular termination of contract must be taken into account, especially if the remaining working time is reduced, for example, by a right to take annual leave. Absences of personnel may as well be caused by an internal realignment of resources.

In all these cases, critical tasks may in consequence no longer be performed due to absence of personnel. This is especially critical if the person plays a key role in a business process and cannot be replaced by another person due to lack of expertise. Disruptions in the IT operation may be the result. Thus, other areas and processes of the institution can be substantially impaired.

A loss of personnel may additionally include a considerable loss of expertise and trade secrets, which makes the subsequent transfer of activities to other people impossible.

Examples:

• Due to a prolonged illness, the network administrator of a company remained out of office. In the affected company, initially the network ran flawlessly. After two weeks however, after a system crash, no one was able to fix the problem because there was only one administrator familiar with operation of this network. This led to a network failure which lasted several days.
• During the vacation of an administrator, the institution needed to access the backup media in backup data safe. The access code to the safe was only changed recently and was only known to that administrator. The data recovery could only be performed after several days, because the administrator was not available earlier due to his vacation.
• In the event of a pandemic more and more personnel become unavailable in the longer term, either due to the disease or due to the necessary care for relatives or children. Also because of fear of contagion in public transportation or in the institution, some employees remain out of office. As a result, only the most necessary work can be done. The required maintenance of systems, be it the central server or the air conditioning in the computing centre, is not performed any more. Gradually, more and more system failures occur.