By now, your clients have concluded that pandemic disruptions aren’t ending anytime soon. So, they’ve made the decision to make 2022 the year of business resilience. How can they turn that goal into a reality? Critical event management will help. But what should they know about the practice?
Introducing critical event management
Critical event management takes a cross-functional approach to managing the preparation for, response to, and recovery from events that impact continuity, operations, and safety.
Sounds an awful lot like incident management, emergency response and communications, and/or crisis management, right?
Well, critical event management intersects those fields. The nuance, though, is that critical event management aligns inter-departmental (or agency) resources to respond to disruptive incidents.
It’s valuable work that involves teaming up stakeholders from relevant business lines to improve inter-departmental (or multi-stakeholder) coordination and communication flows, by integrating necessary processes and post-hoc reporting and analysis.
The advantages of such an approach are manifold. For one, critical event management prevents siloing.
Indeed, effective critical event management (specifically) enables effective communication, giving clients a consolidated view of threats, as well as automated functionality to assess and respond to those threats.
Challenges your clients should consider
But it won’t happen without your intervention. Without help, clients will find that their critical event management capability will run into trouble.
Key challenges to effective critical event management include the following:
- Lack of 100 per cent reach
- System downtime
- Inability to measure the impact or size of the critical event
- Ineffective inter-departmental communication and coordination
- Lack of integration with key business systems
- Limited ability to respond quickly
That’s not all, though.
After all, your clients might have built up critical event management muscle memory from responding to the pandemic. Senior leaders, for instance, became more attuned to the importance of organisational resilience.
That awareness, however, didn’t trickled down to staff. Which will only hinder implementing and operationalising critical event management best practices.
Finding critical event management solutions for your clients
What can be done, instead?
Here, critical event management solutions will come in handy for your clients.
What do they do, specifically? These management systems offer multiple use case solutions to ensure continuous improvement with the following innovative capabilities:
- Crisis management. Advanced solutions apply best practices to plan for, respond to, and manage critical events and exercises.
- Incident response plans and checklists. Best-practice libraries come included so clients can easily create crisis strategies and action plans for different types of events that define the required strategy, action items, completion time targets, and people involved.
- Welfare checks. The solutions enable clients to send welfare check messages to their event response staff or any other type of contact. Organisations can easily collect their replies to identify who needs assistance and prioritise follow-up actions.
Finally, clients can’t be certain what the future will be bring. Only certain in the fact that threats aren’t going away. Critical event management solutions and strategies provide the best means to develop a base level of resilience to mitigate the impact of those threats. For more, download our guide to critical event management.
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