10 Suggested New Year’s Resolutions for Business Continuity Managers!

Jan 1, 2015

If you are not content with just setting your own personal new year’s resolutions, perhaps you might want to set some business continuity ones! Here are some you may want to consider:

  1. Adopt one of my themes from last year and simplify your BIA. Get a copy of the BCI’s Good Practice Guidelines and check that you have all the requirements of a BIA and Threat Analysis in your document. Cut out everything else which is not needed and does not add value to the analysis. Do not collect information for the sake of it.
  2. Book yourself on some training. However experienced you are, there is always more to learn, so book yourself on a training course or attend a seminar.
  3. Horizon scan. Get a group of managers perhaps even the senior managers of your organisation and review possible new threats to the organisation. Check that your existing plans cover all potential threats. Make use of the BCI’s Horizon Scan 2014 Survey Report, which is free from their website, to frame your discussions.
  4. Look again at your supply chain and the risks associated with loss of a key supplier or an outsourced service provider. The beaching of the car transporter ship Hoegh Osaka in Southampton Harbour two days ago is a good reminder of this. The ship is full of luxury cars and JCB diggers, and this will possibly have a big knock on for the sellers of these vehicles and the construction companies the diggers where destined for.
  5. Review with all involved in the business continuity, including those who would respond to an incident, all business continuity documents and try and make them more user friendly. Remember, business continuity in the end is about people and not documents.
  6. Review your plans. Strip out all information that is not needed on the day of an incident and place in a separate document. Look at making each plan more concise and making the flow of the plan logical to the stages of an incident.
  7. Awareness training. Have you done organisation wide awareness training recently? If not, think about how to develop and implement a staff wide programme to raise awareness of business continuity within your organisation.
  8. Exercise your deputies. Exercises are usually run once with the main players and then run the same exercise again, but with the deputies taking part.
  9. Check your phone number lists, are they all up to date? Have you done a callout exercise recently? This can be a cheap and effective way to test that you can contact people out of ours and help raise the awareness of business continuity.
  10. Consider getting your organisation certified to ISO 22301. If you are already carrying out all aspects of the standard, it is not a big step to getting your organisation certified. If it is not possible or practical to get the entire organisation certified, why not get a part of it certified.
  11. Like all good resolutions, if you want to give yourself the best chance of accomplishing them, write them down, display them were you are going to see them and revisit them often!

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