It’s not unusual to feel apprehensive about hiring a business continuity consultant, or indeed any kind of consultant. There are a number of possible reasons. Fear of the unknown is one. How do they work? How do they charge? What return on my investment will I get? Fear of change is another. Consultants bring change (why else would you hire them), change brings fear and so consultants bring fear. There’s a temptation to play it safe. However, business life is by its nature unsafe and unpredictable.
Posts Tagged ‘Business Continuity Consultants’
Hiring a business continuity consultant – scoping is key
Thursday, June 21st, 2012Maximum Tolerable Outage of Your BC Team
Wednesday, March 28th, 2012To put a new twist on maximum tolerable outage, we’re talking about the length of time an organisation can afford to stop working, not in terms of making its products or providing its services, but on looking after its business continuity. Companies that have dedicated BC personnel may never have to answer the question. However, other BC staff can be pulled out and put on other projects and emergencies. After all, if the business is running and a business continuity plan exists, the temptation might be to use BC personnel elsewhere in the organisation.
Does a Business Continuity Consultant Interfere?
Thursday, February 2nd, 2012Interference has negative connotations, and a business continuity consultant should bring something positive, not negative, to an organisation. However, if an organisation is to derive any benefit from the services of a BC consultant, there has to be change at some level. Change has to be driven or at least guided. Change is disruptive by definition. The question that organisations sometimes ask, “Will these consulting methods interfere with what we currently do?”, really has to be another question: “How can these consulting methods bring something that is not seen as interference, but as positive change?”
Rightsizing Your Business Continuity Consultant
Tuesday, January 17th, 2012Of course, what we really mean is rightsizing the services a business continuity consultant can provide. How much or how little an organisation decides to involve an external consultant will depend on the extent of business continuity planning needs, and how that organisation is set up to handle them. Ideally, you’ll leverage the involvement of a business continuity consultant to get the most benefit for the least outlay, keeping the decision-making process flexible according to needs and resources. However, there’s one situation where you’ll often get more “bang for your buck” by bringing in a consultant.
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Black Swans and Business Continuity Consultants
Wednesday, January 11th, 2012“Black Swan”, following the theory of the same name proposed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is the epithet now applied to a number of catastrophes and business continuity challenges. The underlying idea is simple enough. Certain high-impact events are hard to predict and have relatively little chance of occurring; however, when they do occur, they can change the course of history. For centuries, the black swan as a bird was thought not to exist. It turned out that such a bird did exist, which was a considerable surprise to “old world” observers. Part of the role of business continuity consultants is to help organisations understand that “black swans” exist and can affect them.
Top 5 things to look for in a Business Continuity Consulting provider
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010The linked article here by Richard Jones of Burton Group in the US whilst written in 2008 is worth revisiting because it describes some useful tips on how to get the right staff for Business Continuity Planning. The article describes what you need in an internal BCP leader and how to find the right BCP consulting firm.
To summarise, the top 5 tips for finding the right Business Continuity Planning Consultants are:
- They should be able to produce a reference list of nearly all of their clients.
- They should clearly state their billing structure so there are no nasty surprises or sub-standard deliverables.
- They should be able to service all of your business locations.
- They should have experience in your type of business or at least a wide variety of industries rather than just specialising in just one vertical market.
- They should provide training, mentoring and tools to empower the organisation to continue the process internally.
So how do we stack up? OpsCentre is confident that we can tick all of those boxes.
Point 5 is something we feel really passionate about. At OpsCentre we don’t want to leave you with a set of documentation that gathers dust on the shelf. We want to help embed business continuity into the organisational culture so that there is a continual improvement cycle and evolution towards maturity of business continuity within that organization.
Read the full article here.
OpsCentre offers Recession Buster ‘Quick Start’ Business Continuity Planning
Thursday, December 31st, 2009This program is ideal for the small to medium enterprise. It is a fixed fee, fixed scope project that provides a complete solution in the fastest possible timeframe. It can usually be completed within a 1-2 week period.
We utilize our consulting experience and best-practice materials to adapt a business continuity strategy to suit your business.
We can offer these services for business continuity and also IT disaster recovery or pandemic planning.
More details in the service overview download section of our website. PDF’s available to download under Quick Start.
BECOME A FAN and COME AND JOIN IN THE DISCUSSION
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
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We are pleased to announce that OpsCentre’s Facebook Fan Page, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles are now up and running and we encourage you all to become a fan.
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are great social media tools where all OpsCentre customers can come together and discuss latest trends in Business Continuity, Crisis Management, IT Disaster Recovery and more.
Keep an eye out on our pages on these sites for all the latest industry news and we welcome your participation on our OpsCentre’s Facebook Fan Page, Twitter and LinkedIn pages.
If you’re not signed up on these sites yet, it’s very easy to get started and become an OpsCentre fan. Simply follow the links below and log your email address with a password and you’re signed-up:
See you there.