CONTINUITY: Business Continuity Managers Training Platform
Duration: 2022-2024
About CONTINUITY
In this historical situation, the COVID-19 pandemic it’s having a growing impact on global businesses and economy. The nationwide lockdowns due to the spread of COVID-19 have forced most of nations to stop their economy, and this has critically affected organizations economic and technological structure. These implications require more than ever the need for resilience in both business and society. In this context, it has proven essential the need for a company to avoid, within the limits imposed by lockdowns, the interruption of the supply of its products or services: it is therefore necessary to integrate the outdated and often ineffective risk management programs through the development of more resilient business procedures. Business Continuity (BC), which is the subject of the following proposal, perfectly sums up this modern industrial need: “the ability of an organization to continue to deliver products or services at predefined acceptable levels following an incident” (ISO 22300:2012). BC is a subject still little known in the professional field: this type of education and awareness are key competences, as they uphold the highest standards and the latest innovations in the industry. Moreover, they are helpful to the highest levels of any organization, who will be able to build a resilience culture across their workforce. The need for higher awareness on the subject derives from the increasing necessity from organizations to be more resilient. Most organizations showed a poor display in terms of preparedness to the pandemic, with many lacking crisis management and BC Management arrangements (Sheffi, Y. Responses to Coronavirus Part Two – Gaps in Our Defenses, 2020; BCI Organizational Preparedness Report, 2020). Therefore, according to further research by the Business Continuity Institute, out of nearly 300 organizations, 90% stated they believe they will be getting increased support for their BC function (The Future of Business Continuity and Resilience Report, 2020). A benchmarking study on business threats highlighted that the number of organizations certifying against ISO22301 has been growing throughout the years, amounting to one in five organizations in 2019 (BCI Horizon Scan Report, 2020). Moreover, inter-sectorial brainstorming meetings were carried out to identify further gaps in the sector: the result was the identification of the need of appropriate tools to increase competences in education and lifelong learning within the BC.
Our role in the project
SIGMA will be the leader for Module III. Crisis Management ensuring proper coordination and guidance for successful implementation.
