Business Continuity - for Business People
At some time, most organisations come to the conclusion that their capabilities for responding to and recovering from an operational disruption need some attention:
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Your organisation may be starting it's journey with business continuity planning - maybe because a "near miss" has demonstrated that the organisation is not as well prepared as it could be, or maybe an important customer has indicated that it is important to an ongoing commercial relationship (many do)
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Perhaps your business is regulated in some way and their regulator is focussing on the issue and generally raising expectations in terms of what they want to see with regard to business continuity
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Some organisations have plans that are in a state of decay and need some specialist assistance to bring them in line with current standards and approaches
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Plans may be in place but management want to be sure that it will stand up to the pressures of a real-life incident and need to understand the options available to test business continuity plans.
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Commercial relationships may depend on your organisations ability to show that it has plans in place so that customers know they can place reliance on your ability to recover effectively from disruptions.
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You might be looking at your current plan and thinking "would this document be of any real us in the middle of a major incident". You would certainly not be alone in having that concern - experience has shown that in a real life business continuity incident, people don't pick-up a huge a document and follow detailed procedures. That part of your business continuity plan needs to be concise and focussed on key response and recovery actions to be taken in a pressurised situation.
So, depending on where you are with your own business continuity capabilities and what is going on around you, your needs for external assistance will vary and you may not need a large expensive consultancy exercise to meet your needs. To help you perform a quick but insightful evaluation of your current position and where external assistance might be helpful, we have developed a tool to create an executive "helicopter view" of your organisations business continuity situation. You can download it by clicking the link below. We won't insist on capturing any contact information from you to access the resource. If what you see makes sense to you, contact information and my LinkedIn profile are contained in the PDF - feel free to contact me when you are ready.
"Getting a consultant in" is not necessarily the best way to proceed, that's why we developed ReFlex reviews for senior managers. ReFlex reviews are designed to be completed in a few minutes and to focus on the things that really matter to the effectiveness of your business continuity plan It contains several critical assertions about different aspects business continuity capabilities and prompts you to provide your confidence level (between 10% & 100%) in your organisations capabilities. An aggregate score is provided on completion of all questions and in a few minutes you'll know whether or not you might need help with business continuity. It's a powerful business continuity evaluation tool - especially when several people from the same organisation undertake the evaluation and compare their perceptions.
Click the download link opposite to perform a quick business continuity assessment for your organisation
RiskCentric | Business Continuity Specialists | Cambridge, United Kingdom | enquiries@riskcentric.co.uk | Tel: +44 (0)1353 667374