Facilities Manager
Imagine the scene. It’s Wednesday morning, eight o clock and you are the Facilities Manager for a large accountancy firm, located in one of their regional offices. Your three floor building was fully cleaned and prepared the previous night for a meeting that morning between your senior Partners and potential clients who are looking to place over three million pounds of business annually.
You arrive in reception and are confronted with the night security officer and receptionists, falling over themselves to tell you that last night the offices were burgled and thirty five new laptops, their cases and peripherals were stolen and damage has been done to one of the rear fire exits leading to the car park.
A rapid search of the building confirms lockers damaged, laptops missing, cupboards emptied and a rear fire exit door smashed. The Partner/potential client meeting starts in two hours. What do you do? You have a serious crime to investigate. You have to restore the building to operational readiness and you have to manage the situation to ensure the business can continue without interruption
This is a factual event. The Facilities Manager to whom this happened was left shocked and numbed but knew he had to take some form of action to mange the situation, which was spreading rapidly out of control. He called his Timeshare Risk and Security Professional from Greymans Ltd for advice and support.
He had been introduced to Greymans Ltd a few months before this incident. Greymans are one of the UK’s leading Business Risk Consultants and one of their many services is the provision of a Timeshare Security Manager.
This service provides a security professional, with corporate security experience who works for a minimum of two days per month in your business, to an agreed programme. He/she will manage prevailing security/business risk issues and commence pro-active work on potential areas of risk as well as providing hands on advice when required. The security professional is also on call for the client, ensuring that timely advice is available from someone with a good knowledge of your business.
The FM called his Timeshare Security Manager. His call was answered promptly and he explained the situation. The Security Manager spoke calmly and efficiently; asked questions relating to the incident and what action had been taken so far. He defined specific actions for the FM to take: call the police, secure any video evidence, review it ASAP, ensure the security officer remained on site until police arrived, preserve the lockers and other equipment for fingerprinting, compile a list of the stolen computers with serial numbers if available, contact the Firms IT managers for support, etc.
From his knowledge of the client’s business, the Timeshare Security Manger knew the client’s company was a List X Firm, undertaking confidential work for the MOD. The Security Manager advised the FM to check with the laptop users/owners as to what information and data was on the stolen laptops and liaise with IT department to warn them of possible attacks on the client’s network. Within a few minutes, the Security Manager had provided a strategy for the FM to start managing the situation.
The Security Manager told the FM that he would come to the offices to assist and take control of specific parts of the problem, thereby enabling the FM to share the workload and enable the FM to become more focussed.
Within a couple of hours, the Security Manager had arrived on site and accompanied the FM on a quick tour to identify what had taken place. The Security Manager and the FM then had a quick debrief to confirm what actions had been taken, what other information had been discovered and agreed a plan of action with each one of them taking ownership of specific parts of the problem. In the main, the security manager ran the investigation and managed the remaining security issues; the FM managed the building and IT support issues.
By midday the offices were running smoothly; the Partners had commenced their meeting unaware of the prevailing issues, whilst the burglary and laptop thefts were being managed.
By late afternoon, police had arrested the security guard who had been on duty that night and two of the three thieves responsible for the break-in. They recovered twenty one of the laptops, and others stolen items from previous thefts and burglaries in the area. The FM left the offices at seven thirty that night, rightly proud of what he had achieved with the help of his Timeshare Security Manager. The Partners (still blissfully unaware of the burglary) had secured their new clients.
The Greymans Timeshare Risk & Security Professional supports all Facilities Managers and others who hold the responsibility for security, but have no corporate security or business risk experience within their skill sets.
The service applies to all businesses and provides an effective and determined response for all security and business risk issues ranging from fraud prevention and investigation, business continuity & crisis management planning and training, security training, equipment specification, vetting & CRB checks to due diligence and security surveys
This service provides a rapid and rich resource for all FM’s and corporate staff saddled with providing and managing the security services and security responses for their company.
For more information, call Chris Cully on 4 or visit Greymans web site at www.greymans.com
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