As a Business Continuity Manager how would you rate the following in terms of priority for your organisation during a major crisis such as a terrorist attack?:
Revenue Streams
Clients
Physical Assets
Work and Intellectual Property
Reputation
Staff
Priority was a major focus at last Thursday’s Business Continuity Practitioner’s Forum organised by Needhams 1834, and this was one of the first questions posed to the Business Continuity audience.
If you are responsible for Business Continuity I would be very interested to know how you would prioritise these and why…if you are really lucky I may even publish the ‘answer’ in a later blog!
The Business Practitioner’s Forum offered some very good snippets of advice for Business Continuity Managers and my key ‘take aways’ from the day included:
1. Make sure that someone logs everything that is said and done as the event progresses. Public Inquiries demand your time and effort following an event and can cause you a lot of stress and trouble if you cannot produce evidence and justification for decisions made.
2. Speak to the media. If you don’t, then someone else will and you want control over what is published. Your company’s reputation is at stake here.
3. There are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ decisions to be made in a crisis, only ‘best’ decisions based on the information you possess.
4. ‘Train hard to fight easy’ as quoted by Patrick Mercer (MP and chair of the House of Commons sub committee on counter terrorism), the philosophy is, the better you prepare, the easier it is to manage the incident.
5. Cost savings on insurance can be made through Business Continuity planning – Vodafone saved £1m on insurance.
Though the exercise itself covered too much content for one day, I am confident that next year’s planned event will be slicker and more focused, and with a little more briefing, supplier presenters will make their presentations more punchy and relevant to the scenario followed. Audience interation was particularly good and some good discussions were held about what people would do in various situations, making us all think about the action we personally would take.
Charlie Hendry of Kent’s Fire and Rescue service spoke with a passion about the need to log everything that is said and done during an event and assigned one person to log this information as he co-ordinated efforts during the Ladbroke Grove rail disaster on October 5th 1999.
If you were at the Business Continuity event it would be great to hear what you thought including the best and the worst bits, as well as your thoughts on what is a priority in a crisis?
Tags: Business Continuity Practitioner's Forum, business continuity priority, Business Continuity Priority Crisis
