Business Continuity
advice for local businesses and organisations
Did you know?
Business Continuity
Planning and Management significantly increases a business or
organisation's chances
of survival as well as adding value to that business or organisation.
What is
Business Continuity Planning and Management?
What should I plan for?
How to develop a
Business Continuity Plan
How Sunderland City
Council can help
Useful websites
What is
Business Continuity Planning and Management?
Business Continuity
Management (BCM) is a continual
process that helps organisations prepare for, prevent (where possible),
respond to and recover from disruptions or incidents, regardless of the
nature/size of the disruption, or the type of impacts they may have. The
risks of disruption could be from the external environment (e.g. severe
weather or power cuts) or the internal environment (e.g. loss of key
staff or ICT/systems outage). No range of risks identified could ever
be totally exhaustive as there are so many permutations of scenarios,
but the range of impacts on your business or organisation will be much easier to
identify as they will be more limited.
BCM is about maintaining
the essential business deliverables of your business or organisation in the event of a
disruption or emergency, and mitigating the impacts of that disruption
on your business or organisation. Without effective business planning, service
disruption could result in: -
-
A complete failure
of your business or organisation
-
Loss of income
-
Loss of reputation
and/or loss of customers
-
Financial, legal and
regulatory penalties
-
Human Resource
issues
-
An impact on
insurance premiums
Adopting the approach of
dealing with the crisis on the day may fail to deliver a response that
will save your business or organisation, and advance planning is necessary for the best
outcome. It provides a planned response - combined with effective
measures to reduce interruption and minimise losses. Such measures will
include systems for identifying and co-ordinating the actions of staff
required to respond to and recover from a service disruption. However,
the process is not a quick-fix or one-day job, but needs time and
commitment devoted to it, and it needs ownership at the senior
management level.
| “I am often asked what single piece of advice I
can recommend that would be most helpful to the business
community. My answer is a simple, but effective, business
continuity plan that is regularly reviewed and tested.”
Extract of speech by Eliza Manningham-Buller,
Director-General of MI5, to the UK CBI Conference, Nov 2004. |
What should I plan for?
With regard to risks and
threats which you should be considering, a register of risks that
are relevant for the region has been produced via the Local Resilience
Forum; known as the
Community Risk Register (CRR), and held on the
 Government
Office North East's website. Particular media attention has recently been given
to the possible occurrence of Pandemic Flu, and this is certainly one
risk which you should consider carefully, along with
others (e.g. loss of power, loss of IT or telecommunications, loss of
access to premises, loss of critical data or information through
computer virus, loss of suppliers etc). You may wish to develop what is known as a "contingency
specific plan", which means that although your generic BC plan should be
flexible enough to cover a wide range of contingencies, including loss
of key staff or loss of many staff, you may want to develop a plan that
particularly looks in detail at dealing with that particular risk.
The Cabinet Office (Civil Contingencies Secretariat) have produced a
Pandemic Influenza Checklist for Businesses (
PDF 129KB) which you may find helpful in your planning process. For
more information on pandemic flu, go to our
Pandemic Flu and Avian Flu page.
How to develop a
Business Continuity Plan (
PDF 40KB) (click for more)
A Business Continuity
Plan will enable a business or organisation to respond in a controlled
manner to any disruption caused by internal or external factors.
There are five key stages that make up the Business Continuity Planning
cycle (click on each title for more information):
1.
Analyse your
business (PDF
40KB)
Make a list of the
critical services in priority order and consider where you may be
vulnerable. The process should determine what your business or
organisation produces, or what service it provides,
and what key staff and systems are necessary for the delivery of that
service.
2.
Assess the risks
(PDF
37KB)
How likely is an
identified risk to occur? How will it affect your business or
organisation?
3.
Develop your
strategy (PDF
23KB)
Your strategy should
determine how you can reduce the risks and how you can recover from
disruptive incidents.
4.
Develop your plan
(PDF
19KB)
A simple generic plan
will provide a list of actions to enable you to continue your services.
5.
Rehearse your plan
(PDF
11KB)
Exercise and test your
plans to identify problems with it, or areas which need revising. This
will need to be a regular, ongoing process to keep the plan up to date
and effective.
How Sunderland City
Council can help
The promotion of
Business Continuity Management is a responsibility placed on all local
authorities by the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. Sunderland City
Council can assist the business and voluntary community by providing
initial business continuity information and advice on where further
assistance can be obtained. We can provide general advice, but for
specific advice such as preparation and checking of plans etc, contact the Business Continuity Institute, who hold a register of
approved BCM consultants. Their website address in shown in the section
entitled "Useful websites".
Sunderland City Council have also produced a leaflet
(PDF document, 94KB) containing advice on Business Continuity, which
summarises the key information. Further useful documents are included
below:
Useful Websites
For more information on
how to implement BCM in your business or organisation, see the following websites:
The Business Continuity
Institute’s website:
http://www.thebci.org/,
register of BCM consultants, plus the Good Practice Guidelines, a
document which is widely accepted and used, and which will become an input into the PAS56
revision as it moves towards a British and International Standard under
the guidance of the BSI. They also have a pocket size Good Practice
Guidelines which is a very concise two page document, giving an overview
of the BCM process.
Tyne & Wear Emergency Planning Unit:
http://www.twepu.gov.uk/cont.html,
general advice and a summary of the BCM conference held at the Sage
Centre, Gateshead in February 2005
UK Resilience:
www.ukresilience.gov.uk, further information on the Civil
Contingencies Act and downloadable documents.
Government Office North East:
www.go-ne.gov.uk,
Government Agency Business Continuity advice, the Community Risk
Register for the Northumbria area.
Resilience North East website:
http://www.resiliencenortheast.org.uk/,
more detail on the Sage BCM conference, useful downloadable
presentations
MI5:
www.mi5.gov.uk,
Security advice - how to protect your business or organisation against security threats
etc.
Preparing for Emergencies website:
http://www.preparingforemergencies.gov.uk/business/index.shtm,
wide ranging advice to businesses and organisation to help prepare for emergencies,
including some case studies of a range of organisations with regard to
their approach to BCM and how it has helped them in the past.
London Prepared:
http://www.londonprepared.gov.uk/business/businesscont/index.htm,
although London-based, a very user-friendly site with many good
tools for BCM planning and generic advice.
The Continuity Forum:
http://www.continuityforum.org.uk/,
good forum for keeping abreast with current BCM issues including
forthcoming events and conferences
Continuity Central:
http://www.continuitycentral.com/,
a site with a bit of everything - tools, articles, advice, news and
events
Norfolk County Council:
www.normit.org, BCM
advice and templates etc.
For more information please contact the Emergency Planning and
Response Team at
emergencyplanning@sunderland.gov.uk or ring us on 0191 561
2662/2702.
last updated
03/03/08
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