“Now people want to be proactive in trying to make sure that their plan is up to date. It's been really great.” — Kendall Emerick, continuity and safety specialist at California State University, Monterey Bay

Key Results

• Unprecedented faculty and staff engagement
• Greater institutional resilience and preparedness through new planning and management capabilities

‍Overview

Founded in 1994, California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB), is one of the smallest of the 23 California State schools. U.S. News & World Report ranks the university, known for its environmental and marine science programs, No. 1 in the West for social mobility. Fifty-three percent of CSUMB’s roughly 7,000 students are first-generation college attendees, and more than half are Hispanic.

Problem

CSUMB’s existing business continuity plans (BCPs) lacked campus-wide continuity — many hadn’t been updated in years. The university’s Safety, Risk & Sustainability department wanted to align plans so they only required annual maintenance and consolidate multiple plans into single ones where possible.

Other goals included: 

• Giving plan owners flexibility within the system
• Improving plan continuity related to academics and information technology (IT)
• Assessing plan ownership, as some plan authors had left the university

Solution

Using Kuali Ready, CSUMB streamlined BCP updates and achieved greater campus-wide continuity. Kuali provided hands-on support to train CSUMB staff so they could guide other departments’ use of the platform.

CSUMB Continuity & Safety Specialist Kendall Emerick, who led the project, developed a three-year timeline for updating the plans and met with 86% of plan owners in the first three months of 2022. She walked them through their plans page by page, “educating them on the different concepts that were listed in Ready,” she says. Almost three-quarters of plans were updated that first year.

Emerick and her team worked closely with departments to sign off on plans, employing Ready’s real-time collaboration tools and offering flexibility on deadlines to encourage participation. A university-wide Continuity Advisory Group was formed to provide ongoing input on the process.

Results

CSUMB reduced its BCPs from 60 to 56 in the first year. By the end of year two, 89% of plans had been updated, improving university preparedness through the new planning and management capabilities.

Emerick especially appreciates Ready’s custom reports feature. “The reporting tool has been an incredible resource for developing several bigger projects, such as our Enterprise Continuity of Operations Plan (E-COOP), Business Impact Analysis, Lessons Learned reports, training and more,” she says. “I tend to be an out-of-the-box thinker, and this feature has allowed me to see some of my ideas come to life.”

Departments now test plans annually, and much of the communication involved in updates has been automated. “We're pretty much in maintenance mode,” Emerick notes, crediting Ready for streamlining the process and fostering campus-wide engagement.