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X how will you be held accountable for

your operations & leadership during a Crisis? W

Crisis Capital
A Competency Management Guide

0
How does the impact of a Synopsis
crisis determine the nature
of crisis competency in your
organization?
A crisis situation can emerge very rapidly and transform a vibrant organization

1
What competency would I
need to engage a crisis and
into a disorganized group of desperate people struggling for survival within a
to continue business? matter of months, weeks, days or even hours. Natural calamity, infection,
malicious intent, complex and interdependent systems, accidents and
negligent acts are some of the major and common drivers of crisis in

2
How can I ensure the
competency of my crisis organizations. While some crisis can be prevented, it is inevitable that a
team?
significant number of them need to be managed once it happens.

3
I would like to pre-register
my interest for some of It is common for organizations to rely on their own staff to manage a crisis
these programs and find out situation. This is particularly true when the crisis first hits or when the facility is
more. Whom should I call?
miles away from professional assistance.

Apart from the work that the police and civil defence do, organizations are
accountable to their shareholders, their customers, their employees and their
immediate neighbours to ensure that the crisis gets resolved completely and
within the shortest time possible.

Crisis Capital refers to the accumulated stock of assets, resources and

competency build up over time that can be employed to prevent a crisis from
erupting or mitigate the impact of a crisis once it erupts.

CrisisAsia Pte Ltd

350 Orchard Road #11-08 This paper is intended to assist crisis management and business continuity
Singapore 238868 management team leaders, responders, senior executives, decision makers
telephone
+65-6725 9877 and learning/training departments make the right choices for competency
skype development of the single most important component of crisis capital, our
CrisisAsia
email human capital.
info@CrisisAsia.com
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http://CrisisAsia.groupsite.com

10 July 2008.
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 The CrisisAsia Network

How does the impact of a crisis determine

the nature of crisis competency in your
organization?
An incident, classified as a crisis, refers to the serious version of that incident
which impacts the organization, its suppliers, its customers or its community as
a whole to the extent that serious loss or disruption of lives, assets or credibility
is being experienced.

Alert Emergency Crisis or Disaster

operational external help multi disiplinary response

Major Crisis Scenarios

Most organizational crisis can be possibly be classified as one of the following:

Natural Disasters Infection

Safety & Accidents Neighbourhood

Environment Terrorism

Financial Governance Brand & Reputation

Malicious Intent Succession Plans

Each of these scenarios has its own confluence of factors that come into play to

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 CRISISASIA EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT
create a unique set of crisis situation. If you have a particular set of concerns
across your organization, industry or location, these concerns will determine the
crisis scenarios you might prepare for.

Impact Dimensions

Each of these crisis situations usually yield a set of predictable or likely impacts
based on precedent events. Of course, it can and will also yield a corresponding
set of unpredictable impacts. While it is almost impossible to plan for all crisis
situations, we can plan for the major impacts. These impacts could include
impacts to:

People Process

Asset Communication Information

Infrastructure Infrastructure Infrastructure

If you can define in broad terms the nature of impacts across these impact
dimensions of people, processes and infrastructure (say, from an analysis of
major crisis scenarios), it is likely that you can identify and assemble the the
competency to engage the impact.

Example: An explosion is an impact to a building asset.If you expect an explosion as

part of a fire or terrorism attack, it is likely that your organization will need the ability to
evacuate quickly from the building. It is also likely that you need to practise your
evacuation drills. Hence, emergency evacuation procedures and emergency
evacuation drills might be listed as a key competency if your office is in a high rise
building and fire and terrorism is a major crisis concern.

Example: An avian flu infection is an impact to the people dimension.

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 CRISISASIA EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT

What competency would I need to engage a

crisis and to continue business?
Crisis competency planning and development takes place, hopefully, before a
crisis erupts. Once we can determine the types of concerns we have, the impact
dimensions and the nature of impact, we can assemble the competency to deal
with these impacts.

Apart from the competency to deal with the impacts of a disaster, the
organization also requires an understanding of the crisis management
framework in order to sequence and/or partition the appropriate responses.

The organization would need terms of references for their teams, carry out
iimpact analysis, develop plans, conducts exercises, secure management
support and most important of all, be able to embed these initiatives so that it
becomes a permanent part of organizational decision making.

There are 4 major areas that your crisis management and business continuity
teams will be involved in:

1. Review, Analyze, Map and Evaluate Risk

2. Assemble Framework, Infrastructure and Teams
3. Develop Operations or Response Plans
4. Test and Sustain the Program

If you are leading a crisis management team or a business continuity team, the
following list provides some of the key awareness and competency program
and areas you might encourage your team members to consider:

Generic Awareness on Crisis and Continuity Management

1. Staff Awareness
2. Senior Management Awareness

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 CRISISASIA EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT
3. Executive Brief and Analysis on Global Disasters

Competency Modules

1. Crisis Management and Business Continuity Program Management

a. Project Planning
b. Policy and Team Roles
c. Program Maintenance
2. Analysis
a. Threat Maps and Risk Analysis
b. Business Impact Analysis
c. Evacuation Impact Analysis
3. Response Framework
a. Business Reliability Framework
b. Crisis Management Plan
c. Business Continuity Plan
d. Crisis Management Hotline
4. Primary Response Actions
a. Crisis Escalation and Mobilization
b. Disaster Assessment Team
c. Emergency Operations Centre
d. Alternate Site Management
e. Work from Home Management
f. Incident Management & Incident Action Plans
g. Crisis Communications
5. Functional Plans
a. Medical Response
b. Trauma Care
c. Crisis Traffic Response Plan
d. Supplier Management
e. Customer Management
6. Scenario Management
a. Scenario Planning
b. Bomb Threat Management
c. Event Crisis Management
d. Avian Flu and Infection Response Management
7. Process Validation
a. Organizing Table Top Exercises
b. Crisis Management Audit
c. Business Continuity Management Audit

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 CRISISASIA EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT
d. Security Audit
8. Crisis Leadership
a. Crisis Management Leadership
9. Guidelines and Standards
a. FEMA Incident Response
b. TR19:2005 BCM Technical Reference (Singapore)
c. BS25999 (British Standards)
d. ISO/DIS 22399 (Societal Security)

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 CRISISASIA EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT

How can I ensure the competency of my

crisis and continuity team?
The primary individual roles that are of signficance during a crisis are

1. chariman of steering committee

2. crisis manager
3. business continuity manager

The primary teams in a crisis are

1. Steering committee
2. Crisis management team
3. Business continuity team
4. Disaster assessment team
5. Functional teams
a. Security
b. Information Technology
c. Facilities
d. Human Resource
6. Business teams
7. Essential firms and outsourced vendors

The purpose of assembling a competency profile is to enable the organization

to identify competency development opportunities across the broad spectrum of
individuals and teams that play pivotal roles in a crisis situation.

This will allow the training manager or the crisis manager or the business
continuity manager to ensure that the most important component of the
organization’s crisis capital is adequately trained and competent to manage a
crisis; thus improving the chance of being able to reduce disruption, damage
and destuction of the organization’s assets and resources.

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 CRISISASIA EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Primary Response Actions

Standards & Guidelines

Scenario Management
Program Management

Response Framework

Process Validation

Crisis Leadership
Functional Plans
Analysis
Competency Profiles
(sample)

Individuals
Chairman, Steering Committee    
Crisis Manager         
Business Continuity Manager         

Groups
Steering Committee   
Crisis Management team        
Business Continuity team        
Disaster Assessment team    
Functional teams
x Security     
x Facilities     
x Information Technology     
x Human Resource     
Business teams       
Essential Firms/Critical Vendors   
Key:  important; good to have

Some organizations may have vastly different perspectives on how they would
like to manage the people aspect of their crisis capital depending on the nature
of the business structure, industry or geographic environment they operate in.
Hence, it is unlikely that all companies would have identical competency
profiles.

The competency profile shown above is a sample of how an organization can

define their competency profile. The organization would then identify the
specific program in any of these 9 categories and find the resources to train and
develop the individuals or teams on these competencies.

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 CRISISASIA EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT

I would like to pre-register my interest for

some of these programs and find out more.
Whom should I call?
There are a variety of consultants and training organizations who might be able
to provide the competencies you need. You also need to consider if you can get
assistance from your local homeland security department, the local police, the
civil defence agencies, grassroot networks and other non-government agencies
(eg. the red cross, green crescent, world vision ..etc.)

If you cannot find any suitable organizations to assist you, you may contact us.
We conduct public programs across several cities in Asia and also in-house
programs that can be customized to your needs.

CrisisAsia Pte Ltd

Telephone +65-6725 9877 (Singapore)
+62-21-5748 911 (Jakarta representative)
+852-8175 6060 (Hong Kong representative)
+603-9281.6889 (Kuala Lumpur representative)
Facsimile +65-9713 9162
Skype CrisisAsia (free)
Email info@CrisisAsia.com
Groupsite http://CrisisAsia.groupsite.com
Website www.CrisisAsia.com
Address 350 Orchard Road #11-08 Singapore 238868.

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