Our client is a local government area that provide services to the community and implements its strategic plan. The organisation offers a wide range of services, from Arts and culture to Council and local laws to Business and Investment.

As a result of a 2017 internal audit, the council had identified areas of improvement across its crisis management and business continuity management areas.

Our client had been unsuccessful in several previous attempts to establish and maintain a Business Continuity Management System (BCMS) integrated with Incident Management and Emergency Management.

Changes in personnel, corporate restructures, and inadequate experience in Business Continuity (BC) under a risk management framework contributed to these difficulties.

Terra Firma delivered a comprehensive Business Continuity Management System in collaboration with our client inclusive of:

• BCMS strategy.
• Crisis management plan inclusive of a crisis communications.
• Business Impact Analysis.
• Business continuity plans.

We developed a project plan, training modules for CMT, and enterprise awareness of business continuity. Terra Firma structured the program of work into discrete project stages each separated by management review and sign-off gates.
This ensured that the leadership team understood the process and results of each stage. It ensured they were informed enough to understand the ramifications of the findings and their decisions.

We delivered training and awareness for internal staff with business continuity or crisis management roles. A key reason for our client’s inability to drive a BC project was the lack of internal knowledge and experience.
To combat this, Terra Firma structured a program of work underpinned by a mentor program. Our consultant mentored our client’s nominated employee in the methodology and philosophies of Business Continuity.

Terra Firma provided quality assurance of project outputs, and identified improvements where required.

Terra Firma’s approach to BC has been developed by accredited BC Practitioners, based on our long-term experience in delivering professional BC services.
Our engagement style was to facilitate workshops and discussion meetings with as many members of staff as possible. This improves buy-in and participation of the project across the organisation through education and awareness.

Terra Firma introduced the Castellan BC software platform to our client. This is a cloud base tool used in two modes:

1. Under business as usual to capture and store BC information and create and maintain plans and procedures.
2. Response and Recovery to issue plans to owners and track the progress of those plans via live incident management module.

Castellan supports global good practice as it is aligned to the international standard and significantly reduces the dependency on the one person responsible for all BC related information.

The project was halfway through the creation of Plans and Procedures when it was temporarily suspended due to COVID and a more recent restructure.
The project will kick-off again in early 2022.