Business Continuity For Dummies

Preparing for Crises

Quite appropriately, SMEs prepare for incidents and crises (as we define them in the preceding section) in broadly the same way and look to use many of the same personnel, facilities and ways of working when responding to disruptive events. On the one hand, this approach is entirely proper and reasonable; but remember that in the measures you adopt a point may come while responding to an incident (and possibly arise very quickly) when it takes on the character of a crisis.

In this section, we assist you in preparing for that eventuality. To do so, we need to consider crisis management in the round, focusing on what you and your team need to think about and do before the crisis hits you. That’s another way of saying what you and your team need to do now.

Crisis preparation is about a number of different things:

Spotting what may cause you trouble, outside and inside your organisation.

Having BC arrangements in place.

Developing a crisis management capability within your organisation that entails:

• Setting the tone from the top that crisis preparation matters.

• Defining roles and responsibilities.

• Writing and maintaining a plan.

Validating your arrangements; ...