In this week’s bulletin, Charlie discusses the concept of Maximum Viable Business (MVB) and gives an insight into how this can be implemented in our own organisations.
I came across the term Maximum Viable Business a couple of weeks ago, I can’t remember where I heard it from, but it resonated with me. It got me thinking: is this a useful concept for business continuity practitioners and could it provide ideas of looking at the recovery of organisations in a different way? Basically, is there anything in the term and concept and could we use it usefully?
The term alongside MVB, Maximum Viable Product (MVP), comes from entrepreneurship and start-up culture. You start with your MVP and you have to define what your potential customers’ pain points are, and what problem your product or service solves for them. You then have to work out whether the customer would pay to have the problem solved, and at what price point potential customers are prepared to pay for it. You want to move quickly from an idea, to putting your product in front of customers, testing your hypotheses, and proving that the product is viable.
Alongside your MVP, you need to build your MVB to market, deliver, and process the payments of your product. In developing your MVP, the concept is not to build an elegant, expensive, good-looking website, hire staff to deliver the product, buy a warehouse full of stock and then have a fancy finance function; it is to operate with the minimum – to get the product to the customer and get paid for it.
In reading about MVBs, one of the examples quoted was the business Zappos, which sold to Amazon for over a billion dollars. Its founder, Nick Swinmurn, had the idea that he could sell shoes online and wanted to test the concept as he felt that people would buy shoes even if they couldn’t try them on for size. He started the business by asking a local shoe retailer if he could take a picture of some of their shoes, put them on a very rudimentary website, and when the first orders came in, he bought the shoes at full price from the retailer and personally sent them to the customer. He made no money on the transaction, but he proved that the concept of buying shoes online worked, and he scaled from there.
Why I like the concept of MVB is that in business continuity, when we are doing the BIA, we perhaps concentrate on replicating the whole business as it is and bringing the parts back in sequence. I was with a client on Wednesday and they had been trying to do a BIA internally and got very stuck; they understood the concept, but didn’t know quite how to make it work. They talked about the importance of payroll and how that was a key business activity – if they didn’t pay their staff, they wouldn’t have a business.
If they were to do a BIA, it would be a critical activity. If we applied the MVB lens to payroll and looked at it in a start-up way, we just need to pay people. Instead of wasting time and effort recovering the payroll function so we can pay people, we just pay what we did last month. This is exactly what many organisations have to do after a cyber incident, including the Western Isles Council who I interviewed after their cyber incident. If we just pay staff their wages as the previous month, the majority will get the right pay and those that don’t, will likely be 10% plus or minus what they should be, so payroll should not be a major issue. You can sort out in due time the winners, losers, and complainers. If our plan states to just tell the bank to run the payroll again, then the finance people can concentrate on other things which are more important, such as processing payments.
I think if we embrace the concept of MVB, we focus on the customer and the value proposition we are giving them and what we need to continue to deliver that value, even if it is manually; our analysis focuses on what the customer needs rather than trying to recreate the organisation as it is. We have to think through what level of service our organisation needs to deliver. Zappos’ customers were quite happy to buy their shoes through a very limited functioning website which didn’t look very good; all they were interested in was getting the pair of shoes they wanted delivered to them at home, without the faff or time and effort of going to the shops. Customers will put up with a lot, especially in an incident, but you as an organisation have to understand what is important to them and continue to deliver that, even if the way it is delivered is not pretty.
Jamie Lees wrote an excellent article on the strategic BIA, which is close to the concept of the MVB. The strategic BIA focuses on what is important to the organisation’s top management, rather than a bottom-up approach, typically used when conducting an activity BIA.
I have seen some organisations start to use the concept of MVB to sell their services, and in this article, Rubrik are using this concept to promote their security cloud.
There is also the concept of an MVP, which I think can usually be applied to business continuity, but I haven’t yet thought through how we can use it! Perhaps this can be the subject of a future bulletin…
As I have only just come across the concept, my thoughts are rudimentary on how to weave the concept into our delivery of business continuity and how it fits with recovery planning. I’ll keep thinking it over and share my ideas once I’ve explored further.
