Gartner sees the pandemic response in three phases. The duration of each phase will vary by country, industry and enterprise — and even by business unit, product or service. The phases are defined primarily by what’s happening at each stage:

Respond

Immediate actions focused on keeping people safe and essential business functions operating. This relatively short period is marked by high effort and potentially chaotic activity. Key activities:

• Temporary fixes to stop the bleeding.

Recover

More organised/coordinated effort to stabilize operations. Medium duration. Key activities:

• Create a plan to restore a scalable state.
• Identify capabilities you need to strengthen, refactor, reopen, rehire, rebudget, resupply.

Renew

Extended period marked by strategic, durable execution across the organization. Key activities:

• Learn to conduct operations processes and workflows in new, repeatable, scalable ways.
• Use lessons learned and emergent patterns from prior phases to coalesce around a new foundation and way forward.

In reality the UK is moving through the phases, but planning for the future to protect your business is vital.

Principal is helping businesses like yours to streamline operations.  Our processes uncover ways of reducing spend but optimising processes and systems, especially with more people working remotely.  The need to protect your systems is critical.

We’re offering a discovery workshop to help you do just this.  This includes everything from your everyday printing to document management and IT security.