How can Business Continuity Management (BCM) help my business?
BCM looks at events that can disrupt your business and makes provisions for dealing with them, in advance. BCM practitioners don’t often plan for volcanic activity (at least not in the UK), but we can and do plan for generic interruptions to business processes. In other words, rather than try to plan for a limitless number of possible events, we look at the general impacts – such as staff being unable to get to work – and plan how to respond to them. In this way, when the unforeseen strikes out of the blue, we have a crucial head-start and can manage the situation from a position of strength. Organisations with the foresight to have Business Continuity Management Systems (BCMS) in place will typically have the following measures ready to deal with problems such as the disruption of air travel: • An incident management process – for rapid impact assessment and decision-making as the situation evolves • A communications process – to keep staff, customers and the media informed, and preve
