Business Continuity Management – rules
An organisation unit appoints one person to be responsible for the managing the Business Continuity operational processes and plans in that organisation - the BCM Coordinator. The Coordinator may nominate an alternate or deputy e.g. to cover for them when they are sick or on holiday.
There might be one single uber-BCM Coordinator for a large organisation, or the organisation may run as a set of fairly autonomous org units each with its own BCM Coordinator. Our system ought to be able to support either pattern.
Each functional area with each of the relevant organisation units (e.g. Operations, Sales, Projects, IT) has a BCM Team, with a nominated local coordinator (usually a trusted admin person) who is responsible for managing the Business Continuity operational processes and plans in their own area. This person liaises with the BCM Coordinator, and possibly there is a formal reporting line to this person also. This BCM Team local coordinator is trained up on how to run the Business Continuity operational processes, and organises any relevant drills to verify the state of preparedness of their organisation unit. The BCM Team local coordinator may nominate an alternate or deputy e.g. to cover for them when they are sick or on holiday.
Each BCM Team member has a number of named BCM Contacts within the same org unit, who they need to be in communication with in an emergency. Typically these BCM Contacts are the key functional line managers within the organisation units (e.g. Head of Operations, Head of Sales, Head of Projects, Head of IT) or they may be the designated BCM local coordinator. When there is a business emergency, so long as the coordination lines between the BCM Coordinator, the BCM Team and the BCM Contacts are functioning well, communication with the rest of the organisation can be mediated via the BCM Contacts (i.e. the line managers) to their reports along the normal management reporting lines.
Team Activation is the process for putting a BCM plan in effect.
A BCM team is activated when a specific event occurs. It will raise the alert status of the relevant organisation unit, and allows the user (a BCM Coordinator or Local BCM Coordinator) to send a direct message to each of his BCM team members. From the team activation screen the user can directly go to the call tree.
An event can be linked to an existing BCM scenario/ plan or a new one (when an unforeseen event occurs). When activating a team the user can enter an event’s description that can be used in further communication about the event.
Every organisation unit has a BCM alert level. Three levels are used: normal operation, elevated (a non-critical incident occurred) and high (a critical event occurred). The actual organisation units alert level is shown to a user using colours on his home screen (green/amber/red). The top-level BCM coordinator can view the alert level of all OU’s in an organization.
The Continuity solution has three task categories: Initial tasks, Ongoing tasks and Deactivation tasks. The categories can be managed/ extended in the configuration section of the application. Deactivation tasks are tasks that need to be performed when an incident is handled ('deactivated'). For example, in case of a "Loss of workplace" scenario, a deactivation could be to relocate a team back to its original workplace.