The Business Continuity Institute offers guide to help businesses survive recession

CAVERSHAM, 11 March 2009 – The Business Continuity Institute (BCI) today announced the immediate availability of its first ‘Survival Guide’, designed to help organisations of all sizes evaluate existing business continuity strategies. This is becoming increasingly important as we experience what could be the UK’s biggest economic downturn.

As the economic environment continues to deteriorate, the survival guide has been created to demonstrate that effective business continuity planning is now more important then ever. The BCI helps organisations develop greater resiliency against major operational disruptions and has recently launched Business Continuity Awareness Week. Starting on Monday 23rd March, the annual event aims to raise awareness of the growing relevancy of Business Continuity Management (BCM) as an important management framework for UK business leaders.

“In the current economic climate, the loss of a day’s business can be felt even more acutely and it is this that has driven the BCI to create a survival guide that will recommend a simple and workable plan based around key areas of running a business” comments Lyndon Bird FBCI, Technical Director, the BCI. “Businesses will struggle during the recession and Business Continuity managers will have to work harder then ever to maintain standards as business look to reduce costs.”

“The IoD is very pleased to support this year’s Business Continuity Awareness Week.  In the current economic climate ‘resiliency’ has jumped up the management agenda.  BCM is not the preserve of large organisations, all businesses should take the opportunity to formalise their thinking and take action to improve their resiliency.  Preserving your value creating activities against unexpected interruption is more critical when your business is under pressure.  Whether it’s an over-reliance on a key supplier or customer, a change in access to credit, or the impact of adverse weather conditions, it’s a sensible investment of time to review dependencies and vulnerabilities,” Mr Miles Templeman, Director General, Institute of Directors.

To complete the BCI’s online self-assessment survey “Weathering Difficult Economic Times” click here.

To download the BCM Survival Guide as a PDF, click here