Client: UK Major Regulated Utility Company
EPC Team: Martin Fenlon, Kelly Blakeley & Ian Dickinson
Introduction
How one of the UK’s major regulated utility companies worked with the EPC to transform existing emergency planning into an evolving resilience plan that is allowing it to plan for the immediate response to the management of the wider consequences.
The Client
One of the UK’s leading distribution network operators.
Following severe nationwide storms, the client wanted support to:
- Enhance their resilience planning to protect their network
- Develop a strategic and tactical response to issues that could impact the organisation’s business continuity
- Ensure a maintained focus
- Embed changes into the organisation
- Set a plan in place to allow continued improvement
- Reinvigorate its business impact analysis
What We Delivered
Working across 2 major sites in the UK, the EPC team led a two-year programme across the whole organisation to look at business continuity with a particular focus on resilience.
The EPC began by completing a baseline review that met BS 65000 to allow our client to set a benchmark for its organisational resilience.
We researched the existing emergency planning systems that were in place (which focused on the organisation’s storm response) and devised a plan that would allow those ‘war-time’ processes to be incorporated into the business as part of a ‘peace-time’ structure.
This allowed us to work together to create a strategic and tactical response plan to focus on storms, IT, cyber security, facilities management, flooding and terrorism.
Result
The outcome from the exercise informed the company’s governance and proposed improvements to existing processes.
As a result of the 2-year programme the organisation established its own Organisational Resilience Leadership Team (ORLT) and created a new focused role - Organisational Resilience Management.
The ORLT now holds regular, scheduled meetings, has created an integrated programme with the IT team to ensure added resilience and carried out constant horizon scanning to review external global events and watch for potential challenges.
The process has allowed the organisation to improve its overall resilience.
The immersive and experiential learning environment created by the EPC helped to increase mutual trust, shared understanding, communications and collaboration between the various participants involved.
As a result of the project, the client has seen a change in culture in the organisation that has led to:
- Shared responsibility across all departments
- Buy-in across the organisation
- Staff being accountable for resilience and business continuity
- Increased engagement with events such as Business Continuity Awareness Week
- A dedicated intranet
- The creation of an internal magazine
- Increased business continuity management
We would like to express our whole-hearted appreciation for the design and delivery of the exercise which stopped us thinking we were top of the game. We've clearly been woken up!
Chief Executive Officer
Very well delivered exercises with informative and professional staff; scenarios were very easy to relate to the real world.
Chief Information Officer