Planning to hit the beach these days means we also instinctively plan to protect ourselves with sunscreen, a hat, pair of sunnies and the right clothing.
Not surprisingly being in business ought to prompt a similar checklist of protective measures against risks to our premises, contents, brand and reputation.
However, just as our beach readiness guards against long term effects of exposure like skin cancer, there are numerous steps to take to guard against disruption to business continuity.
Potential impacts can be anticipated by building in layers of resilience.
Your Business Continuity Management (BCM) holds a magnifying glass up to your organisation for risk assessment, not dissimilar to a skin specialist taking a long hard look at suspect skin spots, and recommending to ‘keep an eye on that’ or remove it now.
BCM is a similar strategy and encourages a thorough understanding of all possible threats, large and small, which could potentially disrupt or end your operations.
According to a 2014 Business Continuity Institute survey, the top five disruptions that are considered highly likely and damaging are loss of telecommunications, extreme weather such as flooding or high winds, a service failure by an outsourcer, cyber attack and data breach.
A BCM will include added incident/crisis management arrangements which integrate responses to disaster recovery; increase security activities and improve your auditing or preemptive approach, which is becoming critical in ensuring your cybersecurity, for example.
Ironically, in our OH&S obsessed world, the list of credible hazards has increased and business continuity management improves an organisation’s understanding of how these impact operations and puts into place, solid plans for appropriate responses.
BCM encourages regulatory compliance and customer contact focus, considers timelines for recovery and helps put those objectives into place.
In essence you can write a manual unique to your organisation. Just as astronauts can fly shuttles in space, it’s impossible for them to memorise every system function, so when things go wrong they reach for ‘how to’ book mid disaster to act out pre planned strategies – perhaps what buttons to push in what order – to avoid total disaster.
That’s your BCM system which your staff and management ought to know is in place as their safety net in the event of a problem.
Building resilience into the day to day operation of your business or company has all encompassing benefits and will give you peace of mind knowing you’re ready for anything.
Understanding risks, threats and vulnerabilities to the critical functions and processes of your business using a wholistic BCM, makes your operation thick skinned in the face of trouble.