Business Continuity Planning

Most organizations have developed an approach to managing crises and in many cases have business continuity plans in place. The key question is often how effective these approaches are and whether they address the major risks that could threaten the survival of the organization as a whole. Are the approaches sufficiently aligned to the business strategy?

There are two major challenges to implementing effective continuity plans and ensuring they remain relevant. The first is to ensure that the approach is sufficiently broad-based to integrate responses to these significant threats across functions and business units. The second challenge is to achieve the commitment of managers across the business to operate and maintain these plans in a way that gives the organization sufficient resilience. Processes need to remain relevant to the company’s business and management culture if they are to be seen to add value.

AGRC addresses the strategic drivers for investing in business continuity arrangements to help ensure the board and senior management endorse and support these risk management efforts. The ultimate aim is to implement a robust process appropriate to the organization’s culture and exposure to risk. We are able to support clients at various steps on this journey by:

• Delivering awareness presentations and making the case for BCM
• Helping to determine an organization’s tolerance to loss of continuity
• Advising on implementation strategies
• Establishing integrated cross-functional approaches
• Developing and delivering tools and templates
• Benchmarking current processes against best practice
• Evaluating the level and embedding and integration of processes
• Training staff with business continuity management roles
• Testing specific incident scenarios to validate continuity plans