In addition to support with standard business continuity planning documents, the Risk and Resilience Team played a vital role in helping the Research Technology Platforms (RTP) begin the journey in ensuring that not only our business continuity needs were met, but also those of key stakeholders across the University. This ensured that we were ready for the worst case scenarios. The Risk and Resilience team made the process seamless. They attended meetings to explain the process and to listen to our needs, before organising and facilitating a working group to scope potential gaps and issues, responsibilities, and look at next steps. We all know once the right people are in contact with one another it makes work much easier, and the team did a fantastic job of enabling this. We found that the Risk and Resilience team were also a key 'neutral party' in supporting everyone’s common aim of ensuring robust business continuity were met.
I would strongly recommend getting support from the Risk and Resilience team to help alleviate the burden of identifying who is responsible for which areas across campus, to bring together people to reach a common goal, and to support the identification of resilience gaps before it is potentially too late.
We first engaged with the Risk & Resilience team when they offered to run a table top exercise to test the effectiveness of WEG’s Business Continuity plans. The team facilitated the exercise for us, asking us in an informal setting to consider our plans against two scenarios they provided. This test proved to be extremely useful and as a result we were able to identify gaps in our plans, assign responsibilities where they hadn’t been clear, update our processes, and formalise our communication plans. They have continued to support us since this exercise, providing advice and feedback on any updates we have made to our plans, and carrying out further scenario based tests over the years. The team have been a pleasure to work with; they are supportive and informative and their timely review and test of our plans at the end of 2019, just before the pandemic hit, meant that our transition to home working was a simple process for all staff involved. I would highly recommend this process and its value was proven during the Covid pandemic.
I really appreciated the help and support from the Risk and Resilience team in reviewing our business continuity plans. The questions from the team helped to improve the plan and ensured we had covered all the essential areas. The final plan is robust and well thought through as a result of the support we received.
