Keep your edge

A written business continuity plan provides assurance on paper. Regular, realistic exercises reveal whether the plan, people and decision-making structures will actually work when disruption occurs.

Stronger supply chains begin with understanding critical dependencies. Discover how supplier mapping, continuity assurance, diversification and realistic testing can help your organisation prepare for disruption.

An effective crisis scenario should stretch the organisation without becoming implausible or unwinnable. The strongest exercises use credible pressure, difficult choices and clear learning objectives to reveal how teams really make decisions.

A Business Impact Analysis, usually shortened to BIA, is a structured information-gathering and analysis process used in business continuity planning.

ISO 22301 is the international standard specifying requirements for a Business Continuity Management System, commonly shortened to BCMS. It provides a structured framework that helps organisations prepare for disruption, continue delivering their most important products and services, and recover effectively when something goes wrong.

Business continuity focuses on maintaining and recovering disrupted operations. Operational resilience takes a broader view, focusing on an organisation’s ability to sustain important business services, adapt to disruption and avoid intolerable harm to customers, markets and other stakeholders

A crisis management team should be designed to respond quickly, make clear decisions and coordinate activity across the organisation during a disruption. While structures vary between organisations, most adopt a flexible, tiered approach linking operational response, tactical coordination and strategic leadership.

Organisations should implement a progressive business continuity exercise programme to build capability over time, rather than relying on one-off tests. Both ISO 22398 and the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) Good Practice Guidelines emphasise that regular exercising is essential to develop competence, validate plans, and strengthen organisational resilience.

A business continuity plan (BCP) should be tested regularly to ensure it remains effective, relevant, and aligned with the organisation’s needs. Rather than setting a fixed frequency in all cases, testing should be guided by the organisation’s overall approach to risk and resilience. Ideally this should be detailed in its Business Continuity Management System (BCMS).

A tabletop exercise in business continuity is a structured, discussion-based session where staff walk through a simulated disruption scenario. These exercises are designed to help teams talk through how they would respond to a crisis – without physically acting it out – using existing plans and procedures as their guide.

A business continuity simulation exercise is a practical way for an organisation to practise how it would respond to a major disruption, such as a cyber-attack, loss of a building, or supply chain failure. In simple terms, it is a safe, controlled “practice crisis” where people test their plans, decision-making, and communications before a real emergency happens.

A Complete Guide to Business Continuity Consultant Services. Updated 12th May 2026 Key Points A business continuity consultant helps organisations prepare for disruption, reduce operational risk and recover more effectively when incidents occur. Typical work includes...