Business continuity advice
This section provides information for voluntary and community groups about
business continuity - ensuring that your organisation can handle an emergency,
continue to function, and can recover effectively afterwards. The Government
aims to ensure all organisations have a clear understanding of business continuity
and its importance, and foster discussion of how best to achieve business
continuity.
In this section:
Many voluntary and community groups have already prepared to deal with emergencies. The Case Studies section includes examples from charities and other organisations which have been designed to help organisations learn from the approaches adopted by others.
What is Business Continuity Management?
Business Continuity Management (BCM) is a process that helps manage risks
to the smooth running of an organisation or delivery of a service, ensuring
continuity of critical functions in the event of a disruption, and effective
recovery afterwards.
It is a generic management framework that is valid across the public, private
and voluntary sectors. It is an ongoing process that helps organisations
anticipate, prepare for, prevent, respond to and recover from disruptions,
whatever their source and whatever aspect of the business they affect. While
the primary 'business' of private sector organisations is the generation
of profit, a process that Business Continuity Management seeks to protect,
BCM is equally vital for the voluntary sector. Some of the benefits of BCM
for the voluntary sector include:
- Developing a clearer understanding of how the organisation works. To
ensure the continuity of an organisation, you first have to understand
how it works. The process of analysing the organisation can yield sources
of increased operational effectiveness and efficiency.
- Protecting the organisation, and ensure that your organisation
can help others in an emergency. Business Continuity Management
will help ensure that the impact of emergencies on the day-to-day functions
of the organisation is kept to a minimum, and that disruption to your
critical business operations does not deepen the impact of the emergency
on your employees, partners, contractors, stakeholders, customers or
the wider community. For voluntary and community groups that seek to
help others during and after emergencies, it is particularly important
to be clear that in order to help others, an organisation must first
be able to keep themselves going in the face of a disruption.
- Protect the reputation of the organisation. Customers
and stakeholders expect continuity of services, even in the most challenging
of circumstances. They expect you to be fully in control, and to be seen
to be in control - your organisation's reputation is at risk if you are
not.
- Produce clear cost benefits. Identifying, preventing
and managing disruptions in advance can reduce the costs to an organisation
in terms of financial expenditure and management time. The demands of the
insurance market have also increasingly become an important driver. Financial
savings are a clear driver for business continuity in the voluntary sector.
The Business
Continuity Institute [External website] has stated that
effective Business Continuity Management is built on 'seven Ps':
- Programme - proactively managing the process
- People - roles and responsibilities, awareness and
education
- Processes - all organisational processes, including
ICT
- Premises - buildings and facilities
- Providers - supply chain, including outsourcing
- Profile - brand, image and reputation
- Performance - benchmarking, evaluation and audit
The Business Continuity Institute has developed a five-stage BCM process
which is widely accepted and has been incorporated into a British
Standards Institute [External website] Publicly Available
Specification (PAS 56).
The BCM life cycle
Diagram of the BCM life cycle
Delivering BCM - Critical factors
In order to be successful, Business Continuity Management must be regarded
as an integral part of an organisation's normal management processes.
Achieving top-level buy-in is vital to developing robust BCM arrangements.
Engaging senior officers is crucial to the success of any major programme
because of the influence they have over resource allocation and the culture
of an organisation. However, the commitment of the top level is particularly
important in relation to BCM because:
- it requires the leverage they exert across the organisation in order
to be effective;
- it requires decisions about attitudes to risk and service prioritisation
that can only be taken at the top level; and
- the top team is responsible for ensuring that effective governance arrangements
are in place.
Experience has shown that there is merit in giving a member of the executive
management board overall responsibility for the BCM process by being appointed
as the champion within the organisation. This will ensure that the profile
of BCM issues is increased and decisions are made at the appropriate level.
BCM is an ongoing process and it is important to gain the support and endorsement
of the board at the end of each stage of the cycle. Critically, it should
be the responsibility of senior management to provide the assurance that
BCM arrangements are robust.
Experience has also demonstrated the importance of clearly establishing
working-level responsibility for taking the programme forward. The best approach
for programme management will vary by organisation, but the programme is
most likely to succeed if:
- an overall BCM co-ordinator is appointed, and reports directly to the
executive member responsible for BCM. This person would ideally be someone
who has:
- a good understanding of the critical aspects of the business and
its key personnel and dependencies;
- an understanding of BCM methodology and awareness of emergency management
issues;
- an awareness of relationships with other organisations (eg. contractors
or suppliers); and
- good programme management, communication, interpersonal and leadership
skills; and
- BCM is part of every manager's normal responsibilities. The BCM co-ordinator
must ensure that all senior managers (eg service heads) understand the
importance of BCM, the organisation's approach to BCM and their responsibilities
in relation to BCM. Ultimately, senior managers themselves must be responsible
for embedding the programme within their service areas.
Business Continuity under the Civil Contingencies Act
The Civil
Contingencies Act [External website] requires Category
1 local responders (eg. emergency
services, local authorities) to maintain Business Continuity Plans to ensure
that they can continue to exercise their functions in the event of an emergency
so far as is reasonably practicable. The Act also requires local authorities,
from May 2006, to provide advice and assistance to businesses and voluntary
organisations in relation to business continuity management. You can contact
sources of regional
and local advice through this website.
Further information
- The Case Studies section includes examples from charities and other organisations which have been designed to help organisations learn from the approaches adopted by others.
- Pandemic
Influenza Checklist for Businesses and organisations [PDF
129KB, 4 pages] To assist businesses and other organisations
in developing and reviewing plans for a flu pandemic, the Government
has published a checklist identifying important and specific activities
which organisations can do to prepare.
- The Chartered
Management Institute (CMI) Business Continuity Survey 2006 Report [PDF
539KB, 16 pages]. The CMI's survey report, which was supported
this year by the Cabinet Office and Continuity Forum, emphasises the
importance of robust, flexible business continuity planning which is
regularly rehearsed and able to handle impacts on staff and skills as
well as technology and premises. It also emphasised the need for all
organisations to plan for the possibility of a flu pandemic.
- This website allows you to access sources of regional
and local advice, as well as other sources of support on business
continuity.
- You can get more information, including more links, answers to frequently
asked questions, and a glossary of terms, by going to the More
Information section of the website.
- You can get more detailed information on other civil protection topics
on UK Resilience [External
website].
Training
- The Emergency Planning College (EPC) [External website] is the leading provider of training for emergency preparedness, attracting delegates with responsibility for preventing, planning for, responding to or recovering from a major incident. The EPC runs courses on business continuity as well as other aspects of civil protection:
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