Business Continuity Management Toolkit
Related external information
View the Feedback Statement on the Resilience Benchmarking Project Discussion Paper
We are pleased to announce the launch of a self help package for firms to help strengthen their business continuity and crisis management arrangements.
In 2005 the Resilience Benchmarking Project helped identify some of the ways in which the financial sector could improve its planning for a disruption. Firms have a very strong commercial incentive to ensure that their resilience and recovery arrangements are robust - many would stand to lose substantial sums if they were unable to recover within just a few hours of an incident – and the feedback we have received indicates there is a strong appetite for information which enables firms to improve and strengthen their arrangements.
In the Resilience Benchmarking Project Discussion Paper we committed to rolling out a simplified version of benchmarking and developing a Business Continuity Management Practice Guide, in order to share the lessons learned from the benchmarking project more widely and thus enable the industry as a whole to benefit from the results of that project. This self-help package fulfils that commitment and provides firms with a range of tools to help them improve their arrangements, raise standards, and strengthen collective resilience.
The two elements of this package are complementary; Benchmarking Lite will show firms where there is scope to improve their arrangements, and the Business Continuity Management Practice Guide will help to identify ways of doing so.
The Business Continuity Management Practice Guide
The Guide [ PDF ] does not constitute formal guidance from the FSA. Rather, it aims to help firms in their business continuity planning by reflecting back to the industry real examples of standard and leading business continuity practices adopted by participants in the Resilience Benchmarking exercise in order that firms can learn from one another. As such it reflects the collective business continuity planning and crisis management expertise of the UK's most significant firms and financial infrastructure providers. The Guide has a very practical focus. It should not be viewed as a definitive checklist of steps to take, but rather as a flexible tool to stimulate thinking and to provide a framework for firms to develop of their own business continuity plans. Not everything in the Guide will be appropriate for all firms and we therefore expect firms to use their common sense in determining what's appropriate for the nature and scale of their activities. Above all else, firms should continue to be mindful of their individual circumstances and risk profiles when considering what may – or may not – be appropriate for their business.
Resilience Benchmarking Lite
Benchmarking Lite is a self assessment tool which firms can use to identify areas of relative strength and weakness in their own business continuity and crisis management arrangements, and receive feedback on how these might be improved. It is a reduced version of the full Benchmarking questionnaire and has been developed and refined in conjunction with firms that participated in the 2005 benchmarking exercise.
The Lite questionnaire is split into individual surveys grouped around General Capabilities and Critical Financial Functions. The General Capabilities surveys cover areas of business continuity management which are common to all firms (e.g. crisis management, facilities, people etc.) whilst the Critical Financial Functions surveys focus on the activities we consider to be most critical to the well being of "UK plc" from a business continuity perspective during the same and next day after a major operational disruption.
Participants in Benchmarking Lite will receive detailed, confidential feedback on how their resilience and recovery capability compares to other (anonymised) participants and how they measure up to good practice standards. This is in the form of a range of benchmarking graphs showing the firm's performance relative to the benchmark and relative to other participants, together with individual improvement reports showing their scores for all the questions they answered, and indicating how they might improve on areas of relative weakness.
Participants will have access to the benchmarking tool until the end of March 2008 at least. The tool gives them the flexibility to decide whether they wish to benchmark all of their business simultaneously, or focus on individual aspects one at a time. They will be able to re-benchmark each aspect of the business as many times as they wish giving them the opportunity to measure the impact and success of any changes they have made as a consequence of their initial self-assessment.
If your firm would like to have access to the Benchmarking Lite tool, or if you have any questions relating to Benchmarking Lite or the Business Continuity Management Practice Guide, please email the Resilience and Recovery Project team