Response Team

In their simplest form, recovery teams are teams of staff who have a role in the recovery of a business in a crisis event. They have certain skill sets that make them a key component in any business continuity or crisis recovery plan. Their skill sets may be site, or even process-specific, or they could have general skills that, if used well, will enable the recovery of business mission-crucial activities. In order for this to happen, the role of the team and its members must be documented and clearly defined. The staff should be trained in what is expected of them to enable the team to get on with the tasks of recovery and not spend time trying to work out what their role is in a crisis situation. Each team should have nominated deputies for each role; depending on the size of the organization, it may only be possible to have a deputy for the team leader. In the event the team leader isn't available for whatever reason, a deputy can enable the recovery to start without the leader. It is also good practice to have administrative support, in both the strategic and tactical team, in order both to handle large amounts of information without being overrun by it and to act as an audit point. Decisions will be made on the basis of the information available, and if, in the worst-case events, where staff are injured in the disruption or in the recovery operation, it may be necessary to justify in a court of law why those decisions were made, so audit is vital. Having this information available will help in that, and it will also allow replacements—at the of end of the day or when a process break is taken—to understand what's happened and to assess where the company is in the recovery process.

In incident management, there are three types or levels of recovery teams: strategic (gold), tactical (silver), and operational (bronze). Each team and its responsibilities are as follows.