Business Continuity Planning Exercise
Unplanned events can have a devastating effect on any business.
Any crisis such as this year’s riots, a pandemic such as swine flu,
or maybe the loss of a major utility service could make it very
difficult, if not impossible, to carry out day-to-day activities.
It may even mean complete closure, or finding a new location to
trade from. However, careful planning can mitigate the impact of a
disaster and, ideally, prevent it from happening in the first
place.
Work through the exercise below to quickly review your
organisational "resilience". This means your organisation’s ability
to "recover from change or misfortune", to quote one
definition.
You will need a flip chart and 2 different coloured pens to work
through the exercise.
Exercise Part 1
It is 3am in the morning.
You’ve just been notified of a major incident at your care home
which looks like it will result in a total loss of all
facilities.
You need to deal with the immediate issues of continuing care
for your service users.
In 5 hours the “normal” working day starts and news of your
incident will start to spread.
- Your service users will need temporary housing
- Suppliers will want to know what to do with goods they supply
you with
- Employees will want to know what to do and whether they have a
job
- Competitors will want to seize the opportunity of your
misfortune
- And you may have the Press looking for an interesting local new
story
By that time you need to be in control of the situation. What do
you do?
On your flipchart, make a list of the different actions
you would take and what you would need to carry them
out.
The first few hours of an incident response are critical to a
successful Recovery. If all parties involved are able to work in a
coordinated predefined manner, the Recovery can add significantly
to a business’ reputation.
The opposite however can also be true if a poorly managed
Recovery leaves a business in a weakened state financially and
reputationally.
The key areas you should have looked to address are:
1. Establishing responsibilities amongst the team for managing
different elements of the response. For instance; emergency
services liaison, contacting the key customers/suppliers,
contacting/managing the staff.
2. Organising a “command post” and establishing a communications
infrastructure. Putting in place basic systems and resources that
will allow communication links to be established and access to
essential business data and a location from where all of this can
be done.
3. Planning the initial post-event communication. This will be
vital to maintaining confidence of service buyers and suppliers who
may be facing their own business continuity issues because of your
incident. Groups to be contacted could include commissioning
officers, suppliers, professional service providers, the
registering authority, media and staff. The plan should include
what messages will be communicated, how, when and by whom.
4. Establishing the people issues you are going to have to deal
with for your service users and workforce. What do you want them to
do, what H&S issues exist, what welfare issues need to be
considered? How will you stay in touch with them?
5. Establishing the initial stages of recovery. Depending on the
business infrastructure, what can be done to resume activities at
additional locations/third party sites?
Exercise Part 2
- Take a different coloured pen and your answers from Part 1 of
the Exercise.
- Go back through the actions you’ve listed and cross out
anything that;
you cannot definitely do now, or
- requires resource or resources that are not actually in place,
currently ready or immediately available to be used.
- Review the list of actions that are NOT crossed out and assess
the level of control that you would have over the situation if
these are all you can do.
- Then review and list the implications this level of control has
on the business and individuals involved.
For further information, please contact Towergate Patrick by
telephone on 020 8336 0099 or via email at
carehomes@towergate.co.uk