THE Tourism Enhancement Fund (TEF) has produced a Business Continuity Planning Animation series to raise awareness about building resilience.

The series contains six episodes, which are all available to watch via TEF’s Facebook page and on Instagram at @tefjamaica.

Executive director, TEF, Dr Carey Wallace, told JIS News in a recent interview that episode one is an introduction to business continuity planning and speaks to the reason for it and its importance.

He indicated that episode two covers what is business continuity, episode three deals with risk management, while episode four speaks to business impact analysis.

“Episode five looks at crisis management plans and crisis communication plans, because communication is such a crucial aspect of it. During crisis, immediate information is just so crucial – sometimes it’s life or death in situations like that. So, having a good communication plan is important,” said Dr Wallace, adding that episode six covers the recovery plan.

The executive director further informed that the initiative forms part of the push for Jamaica to become a more resilient destination.

He noted that persons would have learnt from the COVID-19 pandemic the need to plan and prepare for any threat that may occur and possibly disrupt the normal flow of business operations.

“We have done the research, the planning and put together a step-by-step process of how we can be more proactive in assessing potential risks [and] threats and how to mitigate against them,” said Dr Wallace, adding that the animation series provides “a good way” to communicate the process to the small and medium-sized tourism enterprises (SMTEs).

He explained that putting the information in an animated format makes it more engaging.

“It conveys the information faster in a more user-friendly fashion and [into] something that you [will] enjoy sharing with others, and so that’s how we’re hoping that it will spread the word and in so doing, make every SMTE operator in Jamaica become more resilient [and] knowledgeable about business continuity, planning and practices,” said Dr Wallace.

In addition to the animation series, persons can also access the Business Continuity Plan Guidebook to get additional information or to use it to follow along.

“The guidebook is the actual physical document, and we even have it online as well. So, you’d watch the video and maybe you need more information, you’d go to the guidebook. If you want information on a specific topic or keyword you can search for it that way. The animation series goes through the actual training, and the guidebook is an added resource that you can use as reference,” said Dr Wallace.

The TEF operates under the Ministry of Tourism. Its role is to lead tourism innovation in the areas of transformational infrastructural and sustainable projects, human capital development and tourism linkages through the applied utilisation of research data.