Crisis management consulting
When a crisis like a cyberattack, a fire, or a serious workplace incident hits, your leadership team needs to make fast decisions under pressure with incomplete information. How they perform in those first hours shapes the outcome: for your organisation, your staff and your reputation.
A Crisis Management Plan doesn't prevent crises. It makes sure the right people are in the room, that they know their roles, that they're communicating clearly and that they're focused on the decisions that matter, not scrambling to work out who's in charge.
What’s included:
Crisis Management Plan development
We develop a comprehensive Crisis Management Plan tailored to your organisation, covering escalation triggers, team structure, roles and responsibilities, decision-making protocols and stakeholder communications.
Role charters
Each member of your Crisis Management Team needs to understand their specific responsibilities during a crisis. We develop clear role charters so there's no ambiguity under pressure and everyone knows what to do.
Crisis Escalation Matrix
Not every incident requires the full Crisis Management Team. We develop an escalation matrix that defines which incidents require which level of response, so your Crisis Management Team isn't over-reacting to minor incidents or has not been alerted about serious ones.
Crisis management exercises
Plans need to be exercised. We design and facilitate exercises that simulate realistic, plausible scenarios, testing your team's ability to make decisions, communicate effectively and coordinate a response in a timely manner. Exercises are the most effective way to build crisis management capability.
Crisis management vs business continuity
A Crisis Management Plan and a Business Continuity Plan serve different purposes and need to work together.
The Crisis Management Plan focuses on strategic leadership response: who's in charge, how decisions are made, how you communicate with staff, customers, regulators and the media. Importantly, the Crisis Management Team keeps the Board informed on the developing crisis.
The Business Continuity Plan focuses on operational recovery: how you restore your time-critical activities and services after a disruption.
Both are necessary. We often develop them in parallel so that they're aligned from the start.
A Typical Engagement
Crisis Management Plan
The Crisis Management Plan documents the procedures for the Crisis Management Team will follow to co-ordinate, implement and manage any crisis. The crisis may originate from the business, IT, a cyber-attack or a privacy breach. We believe that the one CMT should be the one focus point of the organisation’s approach to manage crises. We provide a generic template that is adapted to your specific situation. It includes advice on how to complete the initial impact assessment, address stakeholder needs, prioritise action and recommended crisis communications.
Roles Charter
We supply a template of a Roles Charter that details the roles and responsibilities of staff involved in the management of a crisis. It addresses the management of the program during development, BAU operations and during a crisis. In particular, it adderesses issues that need to be considered by your Board before the crisis occurs.
Crisis Escalation Matrix
We supply a template for a Crisis Escalation Matrix for each of the Prioritised Activities identified in the BIA. You need to establish a procedure that enables operational staff to escalate an incident to another more senior person - if the person that is responsible for the incident cannot resolve it. The triggers for alerting should be unambiguous, have a defined time frame and be clearly communicated to operational staff.
Crisis Management Exercise
The starting point for the engagement is the Initiation phase where the scope, participants, schedule and scenario are discussed. These details are then confirmed in an Exercise Brief that documents the work to be undertaken by our consultants and what we require from your organisation.
We develop the scenario (which is not disclosed in advance to the exercise participants), all of the materials required for the exercise including training materials, checklists to be used during the exercise and participant feedback forms. The exercises typically run over a three hour period and involve you Senior Leadership Team (including your CEO) and the member of the impacted team – e.g. Manufacturing, IT, Finance etc
After the completion of the exercise, we document the outcomes, lessons learnt and present our recommendations for improvements.
What our customers say
“We’ve just finished the process of updating our Crisis Management Plan, including the exercise at the end. I’m very happy with the outcome! The Continuity Matters team spent the time to get it right for us!”
Private insurance company
“Continuity Matters have been working with our organisation for a few years now. We’ve completed our BIA across multiple regions and are exercising the various teams. Couldn’t be happier with the Continuity Matters consultants.”
Multinational organisation
