The 10 principles of the BC are the bedrock of BC Management, wholly supported by the Scottish Continuity Group. Our aim is to encourage everyone involved within the BC community to adopt these principles and to work towards implementation within their businesses.
- Project Initiation and Management
Establish the need for a Business Continuity Plan, including obtaining management support and organising and managing the project to completion within agreed upon time and budget limits.
- Risk Evaluation and Control
Determine the events and environmental surroundings that can adversely affect the organisation and its facilities with disruption as well as disaster, the damage such events can cause, and the controls needed to prevent or minimise the effects of total loss. Provide cost-benefit analysis to justify investment in controls to mitigate.
- Business Impact Analysis
Identify the impacts resulting from disruptions and disaster scenarios that can affect the organisation and techniques that can be used to quantify and qualify such impacts. Establish critical functions, so their recovery priorities, and inter-dependencies so that recovery time objective can be set.
- Developing Business Continuity Strategies
Determine and guide the selection of alternative business recovery operating strategies for recovery of business and information technologies within th recovery time objective, while maintaining the organisation's critical functions.
- Emergency Response and Operations
Develop and implement procedures for responding to and stabilising the situation following an incident or event, including establishing and managing an Emergency Operations Centre to be used as a command centre during the emergency.
- Developing and Implementing Business Continuity Plans
Design, develop and implement the Business Continuity Plan that provides recovery within the recovery objective.
- Awareness and Training Programmes
Prepare a programme to create corporate awareness and enhance skills required to develop, implement, maintain and execute the Business Continuity Plan.
- Maintaining and Exercising Business Continuity Plans
Pre-plan and co-ordinate BCP exercises and evaluate and document BCP exercise results. Develop processes to maintain the currency of continuity capabilities and the plan document in accordance with the organisation's strategic direction. Verify that the plan will prove effective by comparison with a suitable standard, and report results in a clear and concise manner.
- Public Relations and Crisis Communication
Develop, co-ordinate, evaluate and exercise plans to handle the media during crisis situations. Develop, co-ordinate, evaluate and exercise plans to communicate with and, as appropriate, provide trauma counselling for employees and their families, key customers, critical suppliers, owners/stakeholders and corporate management during crisis. Ensure all stakeholders are kept informed on an as-needed basis.
- Co-ordination with Public Authorities
Establish applicable procedures and policies for co-ordinating response, continuity and restoration activities with local authorities while ensuring compliance with applicable statutes or regulations.