Business Continuity Planning
Business continuity planning is the process of creating a plan to address a crisis. When writing out a business continuity plan, it's important to consider the variety of crises that could potentially affect the company and prepare a resolution for each.
How often should a business continuity plan be tested?
It's simple — the more time you put into your business continuity plan, the better it's going to be. You should constantly be looking over the plan to make sure it's up-to-date with your current business processes. The larger your organization is, the more complex your systems are going to be, meaning you'll want to review your business continuity plan more frequently to ensure there aren't any overlooked gaps.
The following schedule is recommended to maximize the reliability and validity of your plan, while also minimizing the amount of time you're putting into plan review.
1. Review your checklist twice a year.
Your teams should review the elements of your business continuity plan bi-annually to make sure all the responses still apply to your current status. In addition, you'll use this opportunity to ensure that each response aligns with your desired business goals.
2. Conduct emergency drills once a year.
Just like schools have fire drills, your organization should have emergency drills to prepare your staff for the steps that are laid out in your business continuity plan. This will also help when a real crisis occurs because they will have practiced the steps before.
3. Hold tabletop reviews every other year.
All stakeholders that are involved in your business continuity plan should meet every other year to discuss it. The review doesn't need to take too much time and doesn't require physically running through the steps, but it can help you uncover red flags that may otherwise go unnoticed without testing.
4. Conduct a comprehensive review every other year.
Unlike the tabletop review, the comprehensive review takes a deep dive into the plan. It should look closely at cost-benefit analyses as well as recovery procedures to ensure everything is up-to-date with current business operations.
5. Mock Recovery Test, every two to three years
This is an in-depth test in which your continuity plan is put into motion to test for any weaknesses or mishaps. Since this test is time-consuming, it shouldn't occur frequently, but it will ensure all internal stakeholders are confident in the plan.
No matter what type of business you are operating, you need to be constantly considering the possible threat of a crisis. If you want to be able to effectively manage them, then it's essential that you have a business continuity plan in place to tackle difficult or unexpected situations.
Business Continuity Plan
A business continuity plan outlines directions and procedures that your company will follow when faced with a crisis. These plans include business procedures, names of assets and partners, human resource functions, and other helpful information that can help maintain your brand's relationships with relevant stakeholders.
For example, one crisis that your business may have to respond to is a severe snowstorm. Your team may be wondering, "If a snowstorm disrupted our supply chain, how would we resume business?" Planning contingencies ahead of time for situations like these can help your business stay afloat when you're faced with an unavoidable crisis.
How to Write a Business Continuity Plan
1. Select a business continuity team.
Before you begin strategizing, assemble a management team to be in charge. The job of crafting a business continuity plan isn't a light one, so this group should include people who are detail-oriented and organized. Some of the roles on the team are:
- Executive manager: This is the person who leads the writing process and is the link between company executives and the rest of the business continuity team.
- Program coordinator: This is the team leader who coordinates all activities related to the plan, such as budgeting and development of recovery procedures.
- Information officer: This person is responsible for accessing and sharing data related to the business continuity plan.
2. Define plan objectives.
What are you trying to achieve with this plan? It's important to know the end goal, whether it be resuming business processes as normal or improving the organization's reputation. When laying out the objectives, you should also consider your budget to get a sense of the resources that you're going to be working with.
3. Schedule interviews with key players in your departments.
Executives and upper management have a great bird's eye view of an organization, but business continuity issues happen at all levels of an organization. For an analysis that's truly comprehensive (and, in effect, valuable), you'll want to interview key team members in various departments of your organization.
Choose individuals who know the ins and outs of their department's operations and understand the importance of its functionality within the grander scheme of the organization. You can ask questions such as:
- What are your top 5 most important processes?
- What systems or applications are needed to support your operations?
- How does [X department] depend on your work in this area?
- In your opinion, what's our biggest blind spot?
- What were to happen if [worst case scenario]?
- Who would be impacted if [worst case scenario] and how?
4. Identify critical functions and types of threats.
The above questions are a guide to help give you insight into the areas of your business that require the greatest degree of business continuity. Prioritize the business functions and threats that are the most critical according to:
- The likelihood of it happening,
- The extent of the loss based on impact.
5. Conduct risk assessments across each area identified.
The idea here is to quantify the information you received during the interviews:
- How long would it take to recover from a critical situation in this area?
- How much revenue would be lost during that time?
- How much productivity would be lost during that time within that department?
- How much productivity would be lost for other departments as a result?
- How many customers and/or stakeholder confidence will be lost?
- Will there be additional costs to get it resolved?
- Will there be additional liability cost?
- How much does it cost to implement prevention measures?
6. Conduct a Business Impact Analysis.
Once you've gathered information across disparate processes, it's time to compile that information into a format that reflects the broader business. A Business Impact Analysis (BIA) analyzes the main operations of an organization, the major resources it uses, how its operations relate to one another — a.k.a. when one function goes down, how does it affect other operations — and how long each function generally takes to complete.
A BIA is a key part of the final business continuity plan. This is where you summarize your findings regarding costs against benefits to further underscore what gets prioritized.
7. Draft out the plan.
Now that you have a good idea of what to include in your plan, start by composing a first draft that can serve as a baseline. The draft should include the following aspects to ensure a well-rounded, actionable plan:
- The purpose, objectives, budget, and timeline of the plan.
- The members of the business continuity team and their roles.
- All of the important stakeholders that are involved in the business continuity plan.
- The Business Impact Analysis.
- Proactive strategies that will be put into place to prevent crises.
- Reactive strategies that will immediately respond to crises.
- Long-term recovery efforts.
- Training and testing schedules for proactive preparation.
8. Test the plan for gaps.
Of course, you should immediately test your plan. Start with communicating with those that play a critical role in your continuity plan. After they know what their involvement is in the plan, conduct a mock recovery test and put the plan into action. Make note of any gaps that arise during this process.
9. Revise based on your findings.
After testing is complete, correct any flaws you've uncovered throughout the process. Continue testing and implementing changes until you're satisfied with the outcomes. However, it is important to be aware that business changes will likely require updating the plans you have. Given this, it's important to keep testing your plan to ensure it's up to date with your business needs, and you're properly prepared for any type of crisis.
Now that you've learned everything there is to know about business continuity plans, use the following template to start creating one for your organization.
Courtesy: best business consultancy in lahore
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