What is Business Continuity Management?

Most businesses face, at some time, an event that can disrupt their normal operations. This can be due to a number of causes including loss of staff through sickness, non delivery of essential goods and services by an external provider or even a major loss of IT, communications or premises.

Business continuity is about making sure that you have prepared your business for the unexpected, so that when your business is affected by some form of internal or external disruption you can continue to operate and get your business back to an acceptable level of operation in a structured, controlled and efficient way as quickly as possible.

Who needs to have a Plan?

Whether your business is large or small and whatever or wherever your location, you can suffer a business interruption. This may come from an internal event for example loss of staff due to an accident or illness, or an external event for example the loss of power or other major supply. The business disruption may even be the result of an event outside of your environment, but which affects your business, for example not being able to access your building due to road closure.

How your business copes with such events is often down to the level of pre-planning, education of staff and testing that has taken place. The answer therefore to ‘who needs have a plan’ is everyone who wants their business to survive an incident and continue to provide products and services to their customers.

Aspects of Business Continuity

Business Continuity involves two distinct areas:

Business continuity planning - where a plan is developed that, when implemented, will help to prevent operational interruptions, crises and disasters happening and will help the organisation quickly return to a state of 'business as usual' should any of these events occur. Once it has been prepared the business continuity plan must be tested and exercised to ensure that it will perform as anticipated.

Business continuity management - this is:

• The ongoing management of the business continuity plan to ensure that it is always current and available; and
• The ongoing management of operational resilience and process availability within an organisation, with the aim of ensuring that the organisation experiences the minimum possible day-to-day disruption.

Business continuity achieves various things for organisations, with the degree of success in each area dependent on the amount of effort, skill, resource and commitment provided by the organisation for business continuity activities. There will be a number of outcomes in every business continuity program which are specific to the organisation in question, but the following are outcomes which should be achieved by every organisation which takes business continuity seriously:

• A deeper and clearer understanding of the organisation

The processes involved in developing the initial business continuity plan and then in maintaining and managing the BCP result in a clear overview of the overall organisation; its structures, dependencies, suppliers and stakeholders. This information is not only essential for business continuity management it can also help planning and strategy in other non-related areas of organisational development and management.

• Proactive measures

Proactive measures are designed for the prevention of interruptions to organisational activities. The essence of good business continuity management is the identification and implementation of measures which can be put in place to proactively prevent operational interruptions taking place, and to prevent crises and disasters occurring. Business continuity management, at its highest level, is about keeping organisations operating at their maximum capability.

• Reactive measures

Reactive measures are designed for recovery from interruptions to organisational activities. Business continuity management programs includes plans for the reactive measures that will be taken should the proactive measures that are in place fail, become overwhelmed, or are bypassed by some unforeseen and unexpected crisis. Reactive measures enable the organisation to return to an acceptable level of operations within a desired timescale following an interruption, disaster or crisis.

• Culture change

Business continuity management programs involve an exploration of organisational culture. Effective programs will utilise change management techniques to ensure that the organisation encourages a culture where all employees are sufficiently aware of everyday risks and their individual responsibility to report, manage and mitigate risks.

Effective business continuity management

The success of business continuity management is built on the 'seven Ps':

• People - roles and responsibilities, awareness and education
• Programme - proactively managing the process
• 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.