The client
National UK Charity
The work
This organisation has around 160 projects across the UK providing critical services to those individuals, families and communities that are affected by drugs, alcohol, crime, homelessness, domestic abuse, and antisocial behaviour. Our client realised the need to enhance their readiness to keep operations running in the event of a crisis. They engaged us to design a cost-effective, scalable business continuity management, disaster recovery and crisis management solution to support their services.
How we helped
The organisation runs a large number of diverse projects involving varying numbers of staff. We visited a representative sample of projects in order to understand their operation and critical processes.
We devised a framework which included a continuity plan for the head office and the regional offices, together with disaster recovery arrangements for information technology. A standard mechanism and checklist was added to this for use by all of the individual projects to enable them to easily and efficiently develop their own continuity arrangements whilst ensuring that nothing important was omitted.
Finally, a management process was specified to ensure that the continuity framework was kept current, including regular testing to verify that the arrangements remained fit for purpose.
The engagement was delivered according to the internationally recognised ISO 22301 (Business Continuity Management: Code of Practice).
Value added
A conventional continuity solution would have been impractical for this type of organisation to operate effectively. Instead we adopted a more flexible approach, which – whilst still aligned to the best practice promoted in ISO 22301 – was capable of effective implementation in the wide variety of projects in place. We also transferred skills to the charity to enable them to maintain the framework without the need for further consultancy.