Hiring a business continuity consultant – scoping is key

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 […]

Maximum Tolerable Outage of Your BC Team

To 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, […]

Does a Business Continuity Consultant Interfere?

Interference 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 […]

Rightsizing Your Business Continuity Consultant

Of 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 […]

Black Swans and Business Continuity Consultants

“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 […]

Top 5 things to look for in a Business Continuity Consulting provider

The 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 […]