CASE STUDY
Safeguarding Operations: Spectrum Reach Business Continuity Success
INTRODUCTION
Charter Spectrum Reach, a leading provider of television, internet, and phone services, needed a robust Business Continuity Plan to keep critical services online no matter what. The company processes thousands of advertising orders each day and supports millions of subscribers nationwide, so even a brief outage carries significant financial and reputational risk.
The Challenge
Spectrum Reach had pockets of resilience planning but no single, enterprise‑wide framework for assessing disruption risk or coordinating response. Leadership sought a plan that would:
- Map dependencies across network, data centers, call centers, and field operations
- Quantify the impact of facility outages, cyber incidents, supply‑chain delays, and severe weather
- Define recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) for every business unit
- Provide actionable runbooks aligned with service‑management best practices.
Agile and IT Service Management Approach
Sprint‑based delivery
Two‑week sprints produced tangible artifacts: risk heat maps, dependency diagrams, draft runbooks. Stakeholders saw progress every sprint backlog review.
Layered BIA workshops
We ran time‑boxed working sessions that blended ITIL service‑catalog thinking with standard BIA questionnaires. This sped up data gathering while ensuring language that operations teams already used.
Jira and Confluence
All stories, acceptance criteria, and decision logs lived in Atlassian Jira, giving executives real‑time visibility into blockers and velocity. Confluence pages served as living documentation, versioned and searchable.
ITIL alignment
Recovery plans mapped to incident, problem, and change‑management workflows. This avoided the common gap where a continuity plan looks great on paper but never integrates with day‑to‑day ITSM operations.
work we did
Enterprise Business Impact Analysis
- Distributed questionnaires to forty‑plus departments and validated findings through workshop interviews.
- Calculated maximum tolerable downtime, financial loss, and customer impact for each critical service line.
Risk and Dependency Mapping
- Created visual dependency models linking customer‑facing services to supporting applications, data stores, facilities, and third‑party vendors.
- Identified single points of failure and proposed preventive controls.
Continuity Runbooks and Playbooks
- Authored step‑by‑step recovery procedures for top‑priority scenarios: extended power outage, core router failure, regional storm evacuation, critical supplier disruption.
- Documented escalation paths and communication templates consistent with ITIL incident‑management practices.
Governance and Continuous Improvement
- Established an annual tabletop‑exercise calendar and a quarterly sprint cycle to keep runbooks current.
- Embedded KPIs and RACI charts into ServiceNow so recovery metrics show up alongside daily operational dashboards.
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CONCLUSION &
NEXT STEPS
Spectrum Reach now has a practical, continuously improving roadmap for staying online when disruption strikes. Next on the backlog: automating failover drills and integrating supplier resilience scoring.
If your organization needs a continuity program that blends agile delivery with proven IT service‑management practices, M&S Consulting is ready to help.
Solutions
Unified risk and impact data into a central BIA repository powered by Confluence and synced to Jira epics
Defined clear RTO and RPO targets, giving executives a quantifiable basis for investment decisions
Produced department‑specific runbooks that mirror Spectrum Reach’s existing ITSM workflows, ensuring teams can execute under pressure without hunting for separate documents
Instituted an agile release train for continuity planning, so improvements drop every quarter rather than once a year
Results & Impact
Reduced Downtime Risk
Critical broadcast and digital‑ad insertion systems now have documented recovery steps verified through tabletop tests, trimming estimated outage recovery from twelve hours to under four.
Greater Executive Confidence
Leadership receives sprint reports and risk dashboards in real time, enabling faster funding approvals for resilience initiatives.
Culture of Preparedness
Regular agile retrospectives surface new threats and lessons learned, turning continuity from a static binder into a living program.