What is a Critical Function?

A critical function is a service that must continue without interruption or restart during given timeframes after a disruption.

A function is critical if it:

  • Preserves life, prevents injury, or protects property.
  • Provides indispensable support for provision of other critical functions.
  • Is required by law or regulatory authority.
  • It must be continued under all circumstances or cannot suffer a significant interruption.
  • Directs or controls instruction or research—be sparing about tagging a function as directing or controlling these services.
  • It provides vital support to another department, unit, or organization (with critical functions).

Four Principles of Critical Functions

  1. All institute functions are necessary: some are critical.
  2. A critical function is a unit activity or service, not a unit name, not an object.
  3. A critical function is comprised of several—perhaps many—processes and almost never is comprised of a single process.
  4. A critical function is a high-value activity or an activity set that is normally performed by your unit & must be available at a sufficient level within 30 days or less if a negative event affects the campus.

Tips for determining what are Critical Functions

It is important to accurately determine what are and what are not critical functions. Over-inclusion can result in a cumbersome plan; while under-inclusion may render a plan ineffective.

  1. Identify critical functions in terms of function and services, not processes, such as:

  • Provide undergraduate instruction
  • Pay employees
  • Provide parking for vehicles
  • Convey outgoing mail
  • Ensure restroom access
  • Provide meals for residents of institute housing
  • Note: Processes are the steps needed to accomplish a function. For example, "food buying", "food storage", "cooking", "serving", and "clean-up" are processes, but the function they accomplish is "providing meals for residents of institute housing.”

  1. Loss of Life, Personal Injury or Loss of Property. Consider a function as critical if it has a direct and immediate effect on the campus community in terms of loss of life, personal injury, loss of property.

  2. Maintain Direction & Control of Instruction & Research. Consider a function as critical if it has a direct and immediate effect on the Institute’s ability to maintain direction and control of instruction, research, and/or mission-critical services at sufficient levels if not continued or restarted in the shortest amount of time possible and within no more than 30 days. A critical function is likely one that must be re-started during the first 30 days post disaster in order to enable instruction or research to re-start or continue.

  3. Consider indirect relationships. Many functions have only an indirect relationship to instruction or research. Nevertheless, these functions may be critical if their cessation would have a significant negative impact on the campus’s ability to carry out instruction or research.

  1. Set the bar high when determining what is critical. For example, visualize department team members performing a function while working in a large tent with a few computers on extension cords, and question whether they really need to be doing this function.

Determining Recovery Priorities

Categorize along the continuum from: Critical 1-Highly Critical to Deferrable

Critical 1: must be continued at normal or increased service load. Cannot pause. Necessary to life, health, security. (Possible examples: police services, provide food/meals to Institute residents, provide student medical care, maintain campus emergency web presence, conduct hazardous waste materials response, etc.)

Critical 2: must be continued if at all possible, perhaps in reduced mode. Pausing completely will have grave consequences. (Possible examples: provide instruction, maintain campus phone service, administer campus email system, at-risk research, conduct purchasing of campus goods)

Critical 3: may pause if forced to do so, but must resume in 30 days or sooner. (Possible examples: research, manage payroll, administer course scheduling/room assignments, student advising, etc.)

Deferrable: may pause; resume when conditions permit. (Possible examples: routine building maintenance, training, marketing, delivery of student programming)

Recommended Process

  1. Identify and meet with planning team.
  2. List all functions for which your unit is responsible.
  3. Discuss consequences of the inability to execute each identified function.
  4. Determine recovery time objective for each function.
  5. Assign criticality rating (recovery priority) for each function.
  6. Determine recovery/coping strategies based off of prompted questions in Kuali (GTReady).
  7. Identify resources needed to execute each function.
  8. Review completed assessment with planning team.
  9. Identify gaps and actions items to improve resiliency.