Broadcast Media Services (BMS)

testing the water

Bespoke Resilience Training for the Water Industry

A strategic alliance between crisis management experts Reflex-Action and communications specialists Broadcast Media Services Ltd: Offering 3 levels of resilience training and assessment to fulfill your legal and auditory requirements as mandated by the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.

Each package offers full compliance with business critical and emergency recovery testing, delivered by water industry and media professionals with an award-winning background in tackling the sort of crises you could face.

“Nothing is real until it has been experienced”

When Cryptosporidium contaminated the water supply to 250,000 people in 2008, Anglian Water was facing a potential catastrophe: customers could become ill, or even die; the company’s reputation looked sure to plummet; operationally, the recovery task was huge.

However two weeks later, at the end of the incident, the company’s reputation had in fact improved (according to independent customer research), there were only a handful of reported illnesses, and the operation to return customers to a normal water supply was entirely successful.

This was thanks largely to how seriously Anglian Water had taken its resilience training requirements in the preceding years. And that was thanks in no small part to the drive and leadership of Simon White, Business Continuity and Emergency Response Manager, and Dan Baker, Head of Media.

Both played key roles in managing the company’s response to the crisis, a response which is now held up as a best practice case study by the CIPR (Chartered Institute of Public Relations), the BBC, and by the Emergency Planning Community, with Simon White giving the headline presentation at the Emergency Planning Society Annual meeting. In fact, Anglian Water went on to win a coveted CIPR Excellence Award for Crisis Comms, for its handling of the Cryptosporidium incident.

Both Simon and Dan have now moved on from Anglian Water, and are working for small companies offering tailored training solutions to a wide range of public and private sector businesses, including many clients in the utilities sector. They have entered into a strategic alliance to offer bespoke, realistic resilience training for the water industry, in which they both clearly have a wealth of valuable experience.


The lead trainers for BMS Resilience Training come from water industry and media professional backgrounds.

SIMON WHITE runs his own crisis management consultancy firm Reflex-action. This follows a 20 year career working in the water industry in which he headed Emergency Planning, Business Continuity and Security for Anglian Water. This has given Simon an unprecedented amount of incredible hands-on experience, including.

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  • Successful management of major ‘no water’ events, large water contamination events, flooding events (both clean water and waste)

  • Tactical incident management, strategic incident management , in the control room or in the field dealing with both the repair and customer impact

  • Incident wash up, lessons learned both internally and externally

  • Media trained and often used to represent the company through difficult events

Simon has used this considerable experience to put into place processes and structures that meet the highest international standards. For example, Anglian Water was the first UK water company to achieve the BS25999 standard in Business Continuity. He has a unique pool of knowledge to call upon, to build realistic training scenarios to really test your crisis management processes.

 

DAN BAKER brings a unique set of skills to his role as Head of Media at BMS having worked on both sides of the information ‘frontline’ as a media spokesperson for a major utility and as a television journalist. He spent more than a decade as a TV reporter, producer and presenter with ITV Central News.

As Head of Media at Anglian Water, where he worked for almost five years, he won the Chartered Institute of Public Relations Excellence Award for crisis communications, PR Week and Utility Week awards for creative media campaigns, and a prestigious Communicator in Business award. Dan’s experienced handling of major media issues coupled with his extensive reporting background gives him an unparalleled insight into the challenges faced by media spokespeople today. Dan has a BA(hons) in Communication Arts & English.

Get in touch

During a major incident, one of the main aims of your company has to be to avoid major stress for your staff, and to avoid people working outside their comfort zones and therefore being inefficient. That’s the only way you can ensure you have done your best for everyone – for your team and of course for your customers. BMS offers a hands-on way for you to understand how your people and your processes work under extreme circumstances, and whether you need some fine-tuning during ‘peace time'.

The training and testing offered by BMS underpins the fact that a vital part of recovery is reputation - reputation is an important thing that can be lost in an instant: You need to have people who you know can and will defend that reputation in a way that's appropriate, should the worst ever happen.

Remember, nothing is real until it has been experienced: let BMS Resilience Training put you to the test.

Contact

Dan Baker, Broadcast Media Services Ltd
Tel: 07973404941
Email: dan.baker@broadcastmedia.co.uk

BMS Resilience Training:
Address: The Media Centre, 97-99 Faraday Road, Nottingham. NG7 2DU.
Tel: 01159553989