Business Continuity subscription service
November 2020
BCM Lifecycle
Image source: BCI Good Practice Guidelines 2018
The challenge
A university in the north west of England approached RAB Consultants to discuss providing business continuity (BC) support in early 2019. This support builds on the existing BC framework at the university and seeks to strengthen their position, drive consistency and ensure alignment with good practice guidelines.
Key facts
- Business continuity support provided through a monthly subscription service
- Aligns to Business Continuity Institute (BCI) good practice guidelines
- Consistent with the principles of ISO 22301
- Collaborative work to strengthen university BC position
The solution
The first step in all our BC projects is to gain a strong understanding of the organisation. We reviewed existing policies, plans and procedures to build our profile of the university and identify BC priorities for the business. Through this review, a need to provide on-going support was identified and the monthly subscription service was formed. Signing a service level agreement (SLA), we provide support across a number of set days each month.
This support has so far resulted in an update to existing document templates to a new, consistent format. We devised a Business Impact Assessment (BIA) Tool in Excel for each department to complete. This BIA analyses activities and the effect business disruption has on them. It helps to identify what is really important – the critical services upon which key products and activities depend upon. We have standardised the design of departmental Business Continuity Plans (BCPs) and prepared a strategic level document for those responding to a business continuity related incident at the university.
Given that we were introducing new templates, we facilitated workshops and provided one-to-one calls with departmental leads to explain how to complete these accurately and consistently.
Conclusion
The support we are providing to the university is strengthening their BC position. The innovative monthly subscription service model provides cost-efficiencies and is flexible to accommodate changes to demands to the university. Our practitioners, certified with the BCI (CBCI), can adapt this subscription model to suit your organisation’s requirements and support you to design and implement a business continuity management system.