‘Business Continuity Manager’ software enters the market

LockPath, a provider of governance, risk and compliance (GRC) applications, has announced the launch of ‘Business Continuity Manager’.

The tool, part of Keylight 2.4, the latest version of the company’s GRC platform, enables organizations to manage business continuity in a simple and effective way, empowering them to create unified business continuity strategies.

Leveraging the flexibility of the Keylight platform, Business Continuity Manager lets businesses create custom business continuity plans, manage the associated risks and minimize potential losses.

Unlike traditional GRC tools, Business Continuity Manager provides common forms for business continuity right out of the box and lets customers use any standard web browser to quickly match Keylight to the company’s distinct business continuity processes and needs.

Key features of Business Continuity Manager include:

• Business impact analysis: Through detailed analysis, users can easily organize complex information, determine the impacts of a loss, and prioritize the recovery function of multiple business components.
• Business continuity plans: Users can leverage pre-built forms, workflows and notifications to quickly build a business continuity plan or create a fully customized plan down to individual fields, field types, field visibility and forms.
• Teams and contacts: The tool enables the appointment of a team leader, identification of a team of essential personnel, and definition of critical vendors so if a disaster occurs, users can immediately locate them and make contact.
• Tabletop exercises: To ensure a plan will be effective, Business Continuity Manager supports exercises to test a plan against a simulated situation and collect valuable information about its application.
• Assessments: Users can launch business continuity plan assessments or tabletop exercises and create reports to gather valuable insight about the plan and its execution.
• Workflow: Custom workflows allow a simplified review of plans and exercises by appropriate experts across the organization. Users can create a custom set of stages that the document will be routed through based on certain criteria.
• Document management: Users can easily export business continuity plan content with all supporting documents (Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Visio files) into one comprehensive Adobe PDF document.
• Extensibility: Users can add lookup references to policies, controls and resources in other Keylight application records to enhance their organization’s ability to proactively prepare for and react to events.

Strategic focus and knowing when to say, No!

First you have to have a strategy and secondly, you have to be able to stick to it. So, make sure you develop a good strategy, one that is a) potentially successful for you and b) one that you can stick to.

Having done that, you now face the daunting task of turning down projects that are not part of you stratgeic focus. Is this possible for you and if it is how is this achieved?

1. Focus! Stay on strategy.

Send a clear message to your team and your clients. Everyone on the team needs to know what the business stands for and to know that it isn't simply there to hoover up money as and when it comes across it.

It is also a statement to clients that let's them know where you stand. It says "We are good at hwat we do and we know what we're good at and we won't let anything distract us from delivering great results to you."

2. Saying "no" to the wrong type of projects.

This is tough but it protects the critical underbelly and fragile wobbly parts of your business. Many consulting firms get overwhelmed by major projects and while they're working hard at trying to ramp up the business and at the same time delivering the projects, they're not spending time selling, marketing or building new client relationships.

Therefore, when the major projects come to an end, they find themselves in a flat zone. Now you have to start the saless boiler up from scratch. Everyone is exhausted from the last project but now you have to tell them to get back on the streets to find new work again because there is no new work warming up on the back burner.

Peaks and Troughs

By saying "no" to disruptive projects, you protect yourself from demanding distraction and can then continue to spend time developing solid new client relationships and deepening existing ones. This builds client loyalty and trust and ensures there is a regular flow of work, which, if you manage it well, will steadily grow at a manageable pace one that is in sync as the company grows.
3. Saying "no" supports the small business model.

Micro-economics. This is simply the basic formula that connects supply, demand, and price. If you continuously increase supply by saying yes to everything, because demand is high, you run the risk of applying a downward pressure on your pricing.

If you say "no" to work that is not cost-effective, you are re-enforcing the statement that your services are "in demand" and your pricing "reflects that demand." You are selling on and applying a real market "value" for the product or services.

The other option is;

• lowering your price over time because
• the quality of your work deteriorates because
• your overloading your workforce /talent (you) because
• you are desperate to generate new work because
• you're in a self-inflicted cycle or downturn because
• other

Turning away work is not an easy decision to make. It can be a very painful decision for a small business to make but a necessary one.

Are you just a gal or guy that can't say "no," even if your business depends on it. Have you better ways of keeping your business focused? Get in touch now!

Thinking Cautiously about Risk Appetite

How does the current trend for Caution in Risk Management affect business potential?

Because well-considered risk taking is critical to business growth and success, not just for individual companies but also to enable or entitle the expansion of a properly functioning economy.

Food for Thought

Business-to-business lending and borrowing always involves a high degree of risk. Therefore, curtailing that appetite for risk can directly hobble entrepreneurship, deprive deserving businesses of capital, and reinforce deflation.

Take a Positive Stance

Moreover, for any business, the assessment of risk should not dwell on the potentially damaging prospects but also on the opportunities; potential rewards and gains. If you take an overly cautious stance this is more difficult to do or can create a restrictive position.

Although the need for risk taking is recognised by both businesspeople and economists, a lot of this is based on theoretical lip service and rhetoric, rather than real positive and optimistic determinations and outlooks.

Complexity

The complexity of risks in the global economy severely tests many companies, both in their judgment about how much risk to take and in their controls for tracking and managing it. What doesn’t help the situation in any way are sponsors and senior management teams who are not comfortable or practiced at discussing risk in the context of strategic decision making or in articulating those expectations to the organisation.

Positive Solution
To overcome the problem of over cautious risk taking, sponsors, senior managers and companies needs a fresh, more rigorous definition of the appropriate level of risk the organisation can accept or endure. The organisation needs to stress its structure, confirm its strengths and articulate its risk appetite.

Set the Appetite

In addition to asking how much risk to avoid and how much to accept, we need to prepare for the possible downside. Leaders should be setting a better example, by defining how much risk they want and establishing how much capital they are willing to stake against it.

Result Focus

Clearly this is only part of the algorithm, because the result of all this effort is to achieve as much potential and capital gain. The whole organisation should be involved and open to this discussion on risk appetite.

Trading on the edge

Traders and deal makers are at the sharp end of it. They, of all people need to fully understand the risk appetite of the company and the part that their individual deals might have in the corporate-wide performance, because they are the ones that have to implement it effectively.

Unshackle and empower your people, by giving them a clear framework, an appetite for risk and a plan for success.