Business Continuity Management

Experience shows that developing a Business Continuity Plan can help to significantly reduce the impact of disruptive incidents and the subsequent costs to your organisation.  It also increases the likelihood that your organisation will be able to continue trading / delivering services if an incident or emergency were to happen.

To develop an effective Business Continuity Plan, good practice recommends a five stage process that is described below...

Stage One: Understanding your organisation

Business impact and risk assessment tools are used to identify the critical activities and the resources required to carry out these activities.  This enables you to evaluate recovery priorities and assess the specific continuity risks which could lead to a business disruption.

You should also make sure that you think about local risks as part of business continuity planning, risk assessment and management is an integral part of the business continuity planning life-cycle.

The Council's Civil Contingencies Unit has identified a number of issues which are particularly relevant to Manchester and can assist you with conducting a risk assessment as part of your Business Continuity planning. Follow the link at the bottom of the page to find out more about our Manchester community risk register....

Stage Two: Developing your Plan

Identifying alternative strategies to mitigate the loss of critical activities and improving operational procedures/practises through writing a Business Continuity Plan.

Stage Three: Testing your Plan

A Plan is not considered valid until it has been tested to see if it actually works or not i.e. is it fit for purpose? 

There are many different types of Plan test, so it is important to choose the type of approach that works best for your organisation e.g. a desktop scenario with a full walk-through of the plan, a 'live' exercise or "dress rehearsal". 

In certain cases you might also want to just test specific elements of the Plan, such as the contact list, activation of the plan, communications equipment etc.  This component test approach would enable more frequent testing as it is not as time or resource intensive. 

The most crucial element of this stage is to identify the lessons learned from the exercise which should help inform improvements to the Plan.

Stage Four: Wider Staff Training

This is a crucial step in embedding Business Continuity into the culture of your organisation.  It is particularly important to deliver a programme of training for staff directly involved in the execution of the Plan, so that they are fully aware of their roles and repsonsiblities.  

A programme of education and awareness-raising activities is also important for other staff in your organisation- this applies to both internal and external stakeholders e.g. external suppliers or dependencies.

Stage Five: Maintaining and reviewing your Plan

It is important that Plans are tested, reviewed and maintained frequently, organisations can change so it is important that a Plan reflects these changes. 

Identify a key member of staff to take ownership of the Plan and arrange for a comprehensive review of the Plan to take place periodically.