Crisis and Business Continuity Consulting Editing and Proofreading Services

A manufacturer activates its continuity plan when ransomware takes down the plant network at 2 a.m. on a holiday weekend. The plan names a crisis management team by job title, lists a call tree, and says the team will convene to assess the situation. Two of the four titles are vacant, the call tree lives on the file server that is encrypted, and nobody can find who has authority to halt production without the CEO, who is on a flight. The first four hours are spent establishing who is in charge.

We edit what crisis and continuity consultants produce — business continuity and disaster recovery plans, crisis management and incident response playbooks, business impact analyses and recovery time objective documentation, tabletop exercise scenarios and after-action reports, emergency notification and communication templates, pandemic and workplace disruption plans, supplier and third-party continuity assessments, executive crisis briefing formats, and plan maintenance and testing schedules. Our editors work on the plan somebody opens at two in the morning having never read it.

The activation section of a continuity plan is the part read under maximum stress by whoever happens to be available, and its failure is a plan that describes a team convening rather than telling one person what to do first. We work through these so the first action is assigned to a named role with a stated deputy and a second deputy, since a plan naming a single title assumes a person who may be on leave, unreachable, or no longer employed; so the authority to make specific decisions — halt production, take systems offline, spend to a stated limit, speak publicly — is delegated explicitly in advance with the threshold at which it passes down, given that the delay in a real incident is rarely technical and almost always the wait for someone senior enough to say yes; so contact information and the plan itself are stated as available through a route that survives the scenario, because a call tree on the encrypted file server is not a call tree; so each recovery step names what it depends on being available, since a step assuming a system that is itself part of the outage is a step that cannot be performed; and so the plan distinguishes what must happen in the first hour from what can wait until morning, given that a document presenting fifty equally weighted actions leaves the person holding it to prioritise while the incident runs. Plans written this way work for whoever is actually there.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including continuity plans, risk assessments and incident documentation. We are editors rather than continuity planners, risk consultants or emergency managers, and we offer no view on plan adequacy, recovery strategy or risk decisions. What we can do is make sure the plan tells one person what to do first.