The business continuity good practice guidelines 2010 were defined by the Business Continuity Institute as an update to BC planning and practice. The fundamental model maintained the six phases of the BCM lifecycle. What changed was the flavour of the guidelines compared to earlier versions.
In particular, BCM was extended both upwards and downwards in terms of scale of events and applications: upwards in the sense that the global trends and issues received more emphasis; and downwards in that big impact, low probability events were no longer the sole areas addressed. But there was also a major difference elsewhere – in pinning down and securing sources of value in an organization.
Business continuity good practice guidelines 2010 define six “professional practices” (PP). These are in turn grouped into two management practices (policy and programme management, embedding BCM in the organisation’s culture) and four technical practices (understanding the organization, BCM strategy, BCM response, and exercising, maintaining and reviewing). The new definitions and structure come from the input of members of the institute who have developed and formed the notion of business continuity around the world. It is this international aspect that also contributes to the orientation of BCM as a holistic process that now stretches across more disciplines.
As an example, GPG 2010 (business continuity good practice guidelines 2010) includes not only incident management but also crisis management, because to keep an organization running with a semblance of normality means taking in to account both these items and reputation and brand image are both sources of value. Responding and managing media coverage can be critical to an organization being able to recover from a business discontinuity, and therefore they have a place in overall BC planning. As a further example, incident management stretches to include coordination with what are referred to as “blue light services” (the public emergency services) for the same reason.