Crisis management

Documents specifying how the Organization responds to the crisis vary depending on the rationale behind their implementation. Sometimes these are Business Continuity Plans (BCP), and when it comes to meeting the requirements of the Act – Critical Infrastructure Protection Plans. Regardless of the reason for the decision to implement crisis management – the content of the document is usually similar and has a number of common parts.

Crisis response procedures developed by Blue Energy experts are always created with customer representatives to meet the needs of the Organization and adjust to the organizational culture and other internal regulations.

The implemented crisis procedures are preceded by an analysis of the criticality of the processes being implemented and the infrastructure owned and include:

• description of crisis structures, identification of people and necessary competences, determination of substitutability, definition of the scope of responsibility for crisis management and decision making,
• requirements for internal and external communication, including: reporting a crisis situation or a potential crisis situation, informing relevant services, employees, public opinion, cooperation with external entities,
• the principles of appointing, implementing tasks, and solving a crisis management team,
• documentation management requirements, including: documentation review, change management, publication and archiving,
• identification of critical infrastructure, critical processes along with an indication of the characteristics and parameters of business continuity and infrastructure recovery,
• risk analysis, including: hazard identification, risk assessment, risk assessment,
• establishing a strategy for providing resources in the event of specific failure / crisis scenarios resulting from the risk assessment,
• requirements and schedules for testing crisis situations,
• principles of crisis management, including risk assessment and crisis development carried out by the Crisis Staff or other crisis management structures,
• requirements for distribution of procedures, awareness building, including instructors, exercises and training.

By creating response mechanisms to a crisis situation, Blue Energy experts focus on the practicality and applicability of the developed schemes during a crisis.

The first principle of proper crisis management is a properly defined accountability structure.

When selecting the composition of the crisis management team, we remember about proper leadership, substitutability and delegation of duties, as well as about ensuring the representation of all important representatives of the Organization.

The second aspect is a properly prepared strategy defined individually for individual critical resources used to implement critical processes.

The third issue is the ability to manage a crisis, constantly analyze scenarios for the development of a crisis situation and take an appropriate response to the crisis. We recommend proven mechanisms based on defining optimistic, pessimistic and the most realistic scenarios of crisis development.

Another issue that cannot be missing is the developed communication mechanisms along with the preparation of standard content addressed to various groups of recipients.

The last point we want to highlight is the ability to test internal structures and how to react. Our experience shows that even the most comprehensive crisis procedures will not pass the exam without regular training and testing of events carried out by Organizations.