Business Continuity Management

Business Continuity Management is a process designed to enable businesses to continue to operate at an acceptable, pre-defined level when faced with disruptive events. 

It helps business leaders to understand their organisation and its essential services and enables them to prioritise its recovery efforts during periods of disruption.

 

Why is it important?

Having robust Business Continuity Plans helps to build organisational resilience and protects against the financial and reputational impacts of service disruption.

 

What should it cover?

Business Continuity Planning is about sustaining your business and enabling it to continue to deliver for your customers.  With this in mind it should consider both internal structures and processes and also where interdependencies may exist with external clients or suppliers.

Your plan should identify critical activities, assets and resources that enable the delivery of your essential products and services through the completion of a Business Impact Analysis.

The plan should assess the consequences of failure to deliver these services and identify the maximum tolerable period of time for these functions to be out of action.

It should consider impacts resulting from the partial or total loss of:

• People (staff)
• Premises (office space, stores/warehouses, front of house areas etc)
• Procurement (equipment, consumables, suppliers)
• ICT, Communication and Data

The plan should also identify actions to be taken in the event of business disruption, possible workarounds, responsible persons and their contact details.

Your plan should be reviewed and tested regularly, and all staff with a part to play should be made aware of their role and responsibilities and have opportunities to practice and develop familiarity with the plan.

More information and good practice guidance can be found on the Business Continuity Institute’s website: