People and communities Business Continuity Planning

Business continuity planning advice

Experience shows that developing a Business Continuity Plan can help to reduce the impact and costs of an emergency. It means your organisation is much more likely to continue trading / delivering services if an incident or emergency were to happen.

Having a plan in place can also help to influence your insurance premiums, so it may be worth checking with your provider...

Although major emergencies are thankfully rare, smaller scale disruptive incidents affect us much more frequently and highlight the need for us to be prepared.

By their very nature and definition, emergency incidents tend to disorientate and overwhelm those involved. Those who have been involved in such events highlight how much easier and more organised the whole experience would be if response strategies have been ‘rehearsed’ previously with tried and tested plans to use.

If you know who will take on key roles, have checklists, contact lists and procedures in place, a tested framework for communications and some practised skills to draw on, then your response to a crisis will be more assured and better than the most intelligent improvisation.

To develop an effective business continuity plan, good practice recommends an ongoing planning process to refine and improve arrangements over time.  The key stages of the established business continuity management 'lifecycle' is summarised in the following pages:

Writing a plan is fairly easy, the hard bit is the planning process itself and getting the right people involved. 

For further advice, email business.continuity@manchester.gov.uk, it's a free source of information to help you plan and prepare for emergencies....

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