The Business Continuity Management Programme

Putting in place a BCM programme includes analysing an organisation, gathering & evaluating data, preparing plans and raising awareness in the organisation & its stakeholders. It involves participation of managerial and operational disciplines and ensures that plans remain relevant and up to date.

The main stages are outlined below.  For step by step guidance see the Business Continuity Management Toolkit

Understand your organisation

This stage analyses an organisation to determine how best to prepare to manage disruptions which might otherwise seriously damage it.  A Business Impact Analysis  gathers the information necessary to understand activities, dependencies and the impact of disruption on each service.  It identifies:

• Your organisation’s key products and services

• The critical activities and resources required to deliver these

• The risks to these critical activities, which may be external or within the organisation (eg loss of - staff, premises, data, IT systems & telecommunications, utility failure, transport disruption, failures by your key suppliers).

Determine Business Continuity Strategies

This involves evaluating data gathered and making decisions.  It identifies different strategies and assesses their effectiveness in maintaining ability to deliver critical functions.  Key to this is prioritising services for recovery and setting 'recovery time objectives' them and determining the resources required to do so.

Develop & implement a response

At this stage, a set of Business Continuity Plans are written.  The plans pull together the response of the whole organisation to an incident.  They provide procedures, information and guidelines for those responsible for handling a disruption, and put into action the strategies selected to enable resumption of activities as prioritised.

Exercise, maintain, review

Plans should be tested to ensure they are fit for purpose.  They must be updated to keep pace with organisational change, and audited against defined standards to be quality assured.