Set up teams to manage business continuity in a disruption

Create an organisation-wide structure for managing and responding to a range of incidents and disruptions. Assign key roles and responsibilities and ensure the right processes are in place.

Your structure for business continuity should:

• integrate with other response structures within your organisation (for example, security or information technology)
• be flexible and scalable, so it can handle incidents of varying scale and impact
• be documented in an organisation-wide plan.

If you have responsibilities under the Civil Defence Emergency Management Act 2002, ensure your arrangements align with New Zealand’s Coordinated Incident Management System (CIMS).

Put processes in place

Ensure your response processes include:

• who will fulfil key roles in a response (strategic oversight, tactical, and operational roles)
• response priorities
• who is authorised to activate and manage a response, and who that responsibility may be delegated to
• notification, activation, and escalation.

Create teams to manage strategy, tactics, and operations

Your organisation will need to consider your response structure at the strategic, tactical, and operational level.

For some organisations, one response team may manage all levels. In large organisations you may need to create separate teams to manage these responsibilities.

Hold regular exercises to ensure your people know what to do, arrangements are fit for purpose, and you identify any gaps.

Strategic response team — your crisis management team

Your strategic response team focuses on the issues from an organisation-wide perspective. The team is usually led by top management and is often called a crisis management team. This type of team needs to be flexible, and involve experienced managers with the authority to apply the organisation’s full resources to the response.

Tactical response team — the coordinators

The tactical response team manages and coordinates the processes required to deliver your critical functions and to ensure resources are appropriately allocated.

Operational response team — enabling continuity or recovery

Your operational response team keeps critical functions running, or does the work to recover them.

Review plans regularly to ensure effectiveness

Whenever you activate response plans (either in an exercise or in real-life incidents), review their effectiveness to ensure they remain fit for purpose.

 

Page last modified: 4/05/2022