Sorry I have not been around – a very hectic week last week, with the Global Head of Business Continuity Management over from the US, and a few late nights looking at general marketing, strategy, and the way forward. Exhausting, but lots achieved.

Anyway, I promised I would tell you about my most recent completed project, which was probably the best one that I have done so far.

You will have seen plenty in the press and on the TV about pandemic flu. This has proved to be a bit concern for businesses, and they often request assistance in assuring that they are ready to be able to cope with sustained absences (whether directly due to any illness, or because staff need to stay at home if, for example, schools have been closed).

Following previous work with pandemic planning with refineries, I was asked to go out to one region to look at the end-to-end fuel supply chain, which would include all the units involved in the fuel supply chain, including arrival of the fuel in Germany, transportation, refining, dealing and through to retail. I was asked to confirm the ability of the region to be able to cope with a pandemic situation within the fuel chain.

I essentially had to do a gap analysis on the plans for the region, and to confirm that the plans all had the correct interfaces, and had linked in together. First, I had to go out to Germany, and meet and train the German analyst who would be working with me, as I would not be able to do the work myself as a large part of plans were written in German. Once I had done the relevant training, and was happy that the Analyst would be able to do the work, I came back to the UK, and managed to work remotely – this ensured that the client got good value throughout the duration of the project.

Once the analyst had reviewed all the plans individually, I went back to Germany, and looked at the overall strategy, and considered the plans from a regional perspective. I then returned to Germany on two separate occasions in order to present the work, once to the client, and once to the plan writers, showing all the gaps that we had identified, explaining how these could be remedied, and suggesting best practice that could be adopted which would improve the ability of the region to be able to respond in the vent of a pandemic outbreak.

As I have said, it has been the most enjoyable project that I have had so far, and has probably produced the most useful results. It is great to do a piece of work that has tangible results, is completed quickly (only 10 days of my time in total and 15 days for the analyst), and can genuinely give good value to the client. And again, this project reinforced the awareness of the quality of people with Accenture, and it was great to work with colleagues in Europe; their language skills put mine to shame….. pity there is not much call for the Serbo-Croatian that I speak!