Risk, Safety & Security
119
Also see:
Risk, Safety & Security –
1.1
High risk decision making,
page 115
1.5
Health and safety at work,
page 118
Keywords
Crisis management, business continuity, operational
risk, health and safety at work
Expertise
Business continuity requires analysis and planning,
but it is only truly effective when steered by a strategic
approach, founded on an organisation’s value
creating activities and an understanding of the needs
of key internal and external stakeholders.
Although many consulting organisations provide
off-the-shelf packages, the approach taken by the
University places major emphasis upon understanding
how processes, information systems and other
activities support organisational strategic goals. This
level of insight helps businesses first understand, and
then develop their resilience.
Crisis management is concerned with the ways in which
organisations respond to high impact (often low
probability) events which test an organisation and its
employees’ ability to cope. Such crises may be triggered
by technology failures (loss of key information systems
or power failure), industrial action, loss of a key supplier,
threats to reputation, product contamination (accidental
or deliberate), natural disasters and extreme weather.
We have extensive expertise in business continuity and
crisis management with a particularly strong track record
of research into organisational preparedness and
response to crisis, along with how organisations can
learn from the experience. Our multidisciplinary
research draws on specialists in psychology, engineering,
management and other academic and business-
related disciples.
We support organisations with their structural and
technical resilience; we are also developing a unique
framework to assist them exploit social capital more
effectively as a means of building resilience. The
resilience of human resources is an essential element
to complement the resilience of materials, buildings
and infrastructure.
The University has a track record of harnessing
its expertise for the benefit of individual
organisations. It has undertaken crisis simulations,
critical and major incident immersive learning,
business continuity planning and vulnerability
analyses. Clients include: BP, Ernst and Young,
PricewaterhouseCoopers, Emirates, RBS, Merrill
Lynch, BNP Paribas, J Sainsbury and the
government of Lesotho.
Capabilities and facilities
•
Knowledge management
•
Evaluating business continuity and crisis
management capabilities
•
Crisis debrief methodologies
•
Mapping strategic strength and vulnerability
•
Business continuity assessment and consultancy
•
Resilient materials
•
Counter terrorism
•
Organisational learning and crisis.
Services
•
Crisis auditing
•
Crisis simulations
•
Crisis management training including immersive,
high fidelity simulations (Hydra)
•
Business continuity management – beyond
BS25999 (an approach which offers a less
bureaucratic, more focused BCM process).
Relevant centres and groups
•
Institute for Risk and Uncertainty
•
Centre for Critical and Major Incident Psychology.
1.6
Crisis management and operational risk
