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Under the civil contingencies Act 2004, business continuity has been made a core responsibility of local authorities, both internally and through promotion to local businesses. Stratford District Council has firm Business Continuity plans in place to ensure it continues to provide its services in the event of a disaster or an emergency.
Business Continuity is ensuring that your business continues to function in the event of an emergency. A business can be affected by many disruptions and of varying scales and having a robust Business Continuity plan could help your company to continue to operate and get back to normal as quickly as possible.
Every organisation will have critical dependencies and a loss or interruption to these can have consequences to your business. Interruptions may be caused by flooding, IT failure, Fire or loss of a key member of staff.
How do you ensure you are prepared?
Business continuity isn't just for large companies, not matter the size of your business everyone should be prepared because any form of interruption could effect yours and your employees lives.
Developing a Business Continuity plan does not require a huge resource or commitment. There are many ways to ensure you survive an emergency, simple planning and assessing your business and then putting on paper what is done on a day to day basis is the essence of Business Continuity.
A simple plan and putting procedures in place ahead of time, making them known to all relevant personnel in you business is a starting point.
The first step is to look through your business processes and use the Business Continuity checklist attached. This is an important stage so time must be taken to ensure the questions are accurate and to ensure all relevant information is documented.
After this process you will have the essence of a Business continuity plan and this just now needs expanding to developing strategies of coping with issues.
The next step is the upkeep of your plan, its important that the plan is periodically updated to reflect changes in staff turnover, changed in technology or changes to business processes.
The final step is to rehearse and test your plan which may require training of staff or the plan may need to be modified. Examples of testing maybe:
- Operating for a period of time without key personnel
- Operating without IT
- Calling key stakeholders to ensure correct contact details
- Having a brainstorming session with key personnel to see how your business could function in various scenarios.
Useful Links
London Prepared
Cabinet Office - UK Resilience
Business Continuity Institute
The Emergency Planning Society
Directgov - Preparing for Emergencies
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