| BUSINESS CONTINUITY MANAGEMENT |

What is Business Continuity Planning?  Quite simply its where a plan is developed that, when implemented, will help to prevent operational interruptions, crises and disasters happening and will help the business quickly return to a state of 'business as usual' should any of these events occur.  Once it has been prepared the business continuity plan must be tested and exercised to ensure that it will perform as anticipated.

Okay, so what is Business Continuity Management then?  Well, again put quite simply, this is:

• The ongoing management of the business continuity plan to ensure that it is always current and available and
• The ongoing management of operational resilience and process availability across your business, with the aim of ensuring that the business experiences the minimum possible day-to-day disruption.

Rock Consultants have built a strong working relationship with Inoni Ltd, who have developed a suite of Business Continuity products.  Business continuity can achieve various things for your business; however the degree of success in each area is wholly dependent upon the amount of effort, skill, resource and commitment provided for business continuity activities.

Rock Consultants can provide you with the required resource to help you develop a sustainable business.  There will be a number of outcomes in every business continuity programme which are specific to the business in question; but the following are outcomes which should be achieved by every business that takes business continuity seriously:

A deeper and clearer understanding of the business:  The processes involved in developing the initial business continuity plan and then in maintaining and managing the BCP result in a clear overview of the overall organisation; its structures, dependencies, suppliers and stakeholders. This information is not only essential for business continuity management it can also help planning and strategy in other non-related areas of organisational development and management.

Proactive Measures:  Proactive measures are designed for the prevention of interruptions to organisational activities.  The essence of good business continuity management is the identification and implementation of measures which can be put in place to proactively prevent operational interruptions taking place, and to prevent crises and disasters occurring. Business continuity management, at its highest level, is about keeping organisations operating at their maximum capability.

Reactive Measures:  Reactive measures are designed for recovery from interruptions to organisational activities. Business continuity management programmes include plans for the reactive measures that will be taken should the proactive measures that are in place fail, become overwhelmed, or are bypassed by some unforeseen and unexpected crisis. Reactive measures enable the organisation to return to an acceptable level of operations within a desired timescale following an interruption, disaster or crisis.

Culture Change:  Business continuity management programmes involve an exploration of organisational culture. Effective programmes will utilise change management techniques to ensure that the organisation encourages a culture where all employees are sufficiently aware of everyday risks and their individual responsibility to report, manage and mitigate risks.