Emergency Planning - Business Continuity Management
Business continuity is as important for small companies as it is for large corporations. Plans need to be simple and effective, comprehensive but designed to the requirements of the organisation. Employers have a responsibility to their staff for their safety and security and should be prepared to deal with the impact of a major incident or disaster.
Business continuity is as important for small companies as it is for large corporations. Plans need to be simple and effective, comprehensive but designed to the requirements of the organisation. Employers have a responsibility to their staff for their safety and security and should be prepared to deal with the impact of a major incident or disaster.
Business Continuity Management (BCM) is a process that helps manage the risks to the smooth running of an organisation or delivery of a service, ensuring it can continue to operate to the extent required in the event of a disruption. These risks could be from the external environment (eg power outages, severe weather) or from within the organisation (eg systems failure or loss of key staff). BCM provides the strategic framework for improving an organisation's resilience to interruption. Its purpose is to facilitate the recovery of key business systems and processes within agreed time frames, while maintaining the Category 1 responder's critical functions and delivery of its vital services.
The Civil Contingencies Act requires Category 1 responders to maintain plans to ensure that they can continue to exercise their functions in the event of an emergency so far as is reasonably practicable. The duty upon East Hampshire District Council relates to all functions, not just our emergency response functions.
We are required to create generic plans or site specific plans and to have regard to both internal and external risks when developing the plan. There must be a clear procedure for invoking the plan and there should be training/ exercising on a regular basis.
Successful BCM is built upon seven key principles:
- Programme - proactively managing the process
- People - roles and responsibilities, awareness and education
- Process - all organisational processes, including ICT
- Premises - building and facilities
- Providers - supply chain, including outsourcing
- Profile - brand, image and reputation
- Performance - benchmarking, evaluation and audit
It is a generic management framework that is valid across the public, private and voluntary sectors. It is about maintaining the essential business deliverables of an organisation in an emergency. The primary "business" of the private sector is the generation of profit, a process that BCM looks to protect.
The Business Continuity Institute has developed a five stage process, which has become widely accepted and incorporated into a British Standards Institute Publicly Available Specification - PAS 56. This model provides a generic framework that is applicable across the public, private and voluntary sectors.
For further information about the process please use the following links:
Hampshire County Council Emergency Planning Unit
Business Continuity Institute
London Prepared