Business continuity and emergency planning

The School’s activities are at continuous risk of possible disruption. Business continuity planning identifies and seeks to contain the impact of potential disruption so that it is kept within acceptable limits and does not reach a level that will compromise the School’s reputation, finances and ability to meet its contractual obligations. Effective continuity planning has been shown to carry business benefits for an organisation in terms of its reputation and competitiveness.

The initial aftermath of any emergency, whatever the cause, is handled under the School’s Common Initial Emergency Response Procedure (CIERP). During this stage, decisions about the movement of people, evacuation of premises and so forth are directed by an Emergency Management Team, although in many situations, the Team may itself be working under instructions from the emergency services. At an appropriate point in time, the Team will take the decision to implement the business recovery phase in which critical functions will begin to be resumed, working to detailed business continuity plans.

The School’s approach to business continuity planning, in common with many other organisations, is to identify through a risk assessment the “worst case scenario” the organisation is most likely to experience and draw up plans to keep the impacts within acceptable limits. The scenario the School has adopted is the complete loss of a building and all facilities therein including IT for a period of up to 15 days but work is also being done to measure the impact of other scenarios, in particular, the outbreak of an influenza pandemic. The impacts of the worst case scenario on critical functions and services are assessed over different periods of time and at different times of year and local plans drawn up to recover those functions and services within time limits that ensure that the impacts are kept within acceptable limits.

The School’s Director of Business Continuity, Andrew Webb, is now assisting academic and support units to draw up local plans to recover critical functions and services for which they are responsible in the event of the loss of a building. These plans describe both “pre-incident” actions that will be taken to mitigate the anticipated impact of disruption before it occurs and the actions that will to be taken should disruption actually occur. The business recovery objectives in local plans are based on the time periods within which IT Services have undertaken to restore centrally provided IT systems, as set out in the Statement of ICT Recovery and the School’s agreed provision of alternative office and teaching accommodation. Andrew Webb is working with a group of Departmental Managers to draw up generic business continuity plans for all academic departments that will ensure the recovery of three key activities within acceptable timeframes:

• student induction,
• examinations and
•  teaching.

It is planned to share draft generic plans with all departments during the summer of 2008. As ever, every effort will be made to minimise the additional demands on academic departments.

On a more day-to-day level there are a number of steps that can be taken at the departmental level to reduce the risk of disruption to normal working in matters such as security of information, premises and property, and managing the absence of staff. A short check list of key preventative actions for departments and individuals will be issued to all departments during September 2008.

Andrew Webb is always pleased to receive and respond to queries from Departmental Managers and Heads of Department on business continuity. He may be contacted on extension 4959 or by email: a.webb@lse.ac.uk

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