Wolverhampton City Council – Business Impact Analysis

RAB consultants were requested to undertake a complete Business Impact Analysis (BIA) for the Council to help them prioritise the next phase of the Councils Business Continuity Strategy. In accordance with BS 25999 and ISO 22301 we completed nearly 90 BIA sessions with services and teams within all of the directorates within the Council.

By undertaking the BIAs this meant that key levels of management from the entire Council were introduced to the concept and the importance of business continuity and proved an excellent mechanism for raising the awareness of business continuity. As a result of these workshops valuable data was collated enabling simple and easy to implement solutions to the risks that were identified. By adopting some simple solutions the some service areas were quickly able to increase their resilience to business disruption.

We created a report for each service area based upon the outputs of the BIA workshops using our BIA template. Each report was then sent to each service for agreement.

We also created a spreadsheet that summarised the 90 reports that provided an easy to use dashboard for tactical and strategic management enabling quick identification of the critical functions in each directorate.

Finally we produced a directorate level report that was presented at directorate management teams for strategic sign off.

The process has provided a solid foundation for the next phase of business continuity work. This has provided the Councils new Resilience Team a mechanism to target the critical service areas as identified in the BIA and work with them to create business continuity strategies for responding to business disruption.