Business Continuity

Keeping your business going

Understanding and reducing the impact of business disruption can make or break your organisation. Your ability to recover, resume operations, and eventually return to normal is not only comforting for customers but vital to the survival of your business. Teamwork can help you develop and implement a business continuity plan that will deliver a quick and smooth restoration of your operations in the event of any adverse incident. We can also help you achieve certification to BS 25999.

Understanding the dependencies

The key to an effective business continuity plan is a Business Impact Analysis (BIA), which drives the development of appropriate recovery and response plans. The first step is to develop a business dependency model. Teamwork consultants will bring together key people within your organisation in a workshop environment to identify business activities and resources that are essential to maintain your operations and fulfil customer commitments. Once the model is completed, a timeframe is set, with all actions prioritised.

Identifying business disrupters and assessing the risks

Working in a facilitated workshop format we go on to identify disruptors – scenarios that would impact your business, whether it is loss of people, buildings, IT services, key suppliers or major customers. Teamwork will conduct a risk assessment with key resource owners within your organisation to determine where focus is needed, and to develop recovery plans for all disruptors where the business impact is high, irrespective of how low the likelihood is.

Response and Recovery Plans

Teamwork will help you to develop high urgency response plans to deal with disaster scenarios, including evacuation, fire and casualty treatment procedures. Our consultants will help determine pragmatic, flexible approaches to recovery planning to restore individual business activities or resources to enable you to reach the Minimum Activity Level (MAL).

Controlling what happens

Once the core of the plan is completed, Teamwork will work with your senior managers to determine how they will manage the recovery of their individual operational areas, ensuring that this information is documented and all employees understand their individual responsibilities should the plan ever be invoked.

Testing the plan

Testing proves the plan’s effectiveness and enables further development should any shortcomings be found. Teamwork will help you identify and undertake appropriate test activities, designed to cause minimum business disruption.

Maintenance and development

Teamwork can offer ongoing support for the maintenance of your business continuity plan. Information in the plan must be kept up to date, including contact telephone numbers, individual identities and their roles. Testing should be ongoing. Subsequent risk assessments and plan updates will be needed as changes to the business occur. External evaluation/checking/audit (independent) is also recommended to ensure the validity and effectiveness of the plan.