What to do if your service is disrupted

There are many ways a service at Essex County Council (ECC) could be disrupted. Disruptions can be caused by extreme weather conditions, IT failure, security breaches, supply chain issues and many other incidents.

Who to tell

Your response to business disruption depends on the severity of the incident. If the incident is limited to impacting your team and/or service, inform your manager of the disruption and the impact it is having. They can then look at initiating contingency methods to minimise the disruption.

If the service is being disrupted by an IT or property issue, please ensure that the appropriate helpdesks are also informed.

If you are unsure who to contact or what to do in an emergency or business continuity incident, contact the Emergency Planning and Resilience team for support, advice and guidance.

Escalation

If the incident has impacts beyond your immediate service or goes beyond your capability to deal with it, it needs to be escalated up to a director within your function. They will activate the function’s business continuity plan and form a function recovery team to coordinate the response.

If the incident has impacts outside of your function, the ECC Incident Management team (IMT) will coordinate the response throughout the organisation. They will activate the corporate business continuity plan. The IMT is chaired by the ECC silver officer (tier 3 director) and supported by services across the council.

Business Continuity Plans

Managers are responsible for ensuring that adequate contingency options and continuity plans are in place for their service or team. 

Business continuity plans should be kept in accessible locations such as shared drives or Teams channels. It is also advisable to keep a hard copy in a secure location.

Business continuity plans should identify contingency options for four scenarios, including loss of:

• staff, for example staff sickness, industrial action or key staff leaving
• property, for example inability to work from normal location
• IT, for example loss of whole system or loss of a key application
• supplier, for example key supplier fails or delays in delivery

Corporate business continuity plans, function business continuity plans and service area business continuity plans are also stored in the plan repository in ECC virtual incident response centre on Teams.

How you'll know about a service disruption

Managers should be communicating with their teams when impacted by a service disruption to keep their employees up to date.

If a disruption is impacting services across the organisation, there are a number of methods that may be used to inform staff. These include:

• email
• OneNews
• website banner alert
• SMS (only in urgent situations)

Staff may also be able to get information on business continuity incidents through the staff incident information line by calling 0345 603 7636. This number should be on your staff ID Badge.