To create a good business continuity plan (BCP), focus on these five steps: Define the process and its resilience goals. Assess risks.
Prioritize critical functions through a business impact analysis. Create procedures to reduce downtime and protect assets.
Get key stakeholders involved in the plan. The plan needs to work, be tested, be updated, and involve all responsible parties. For more info on each step, click here.
Summary
- Define the BCP process for operational resilience.
- Identify goals that match your organization’s needs.
- Assess risks to identify threats.
- Prioritize critical functions through business impact analysis.
- Create procedures for continuity and asset protection.
Responsibility 1: Business Continuity Planning
When doing Business Continuity Planning, you must define the process and understand its importance for operational resilience.
Identifying your goals and objectives is key to aligning your plan with your organization’s needs and priorities.
This is the foundation for a good Business Continuity Plan to protect your business when things go wrong.
What is business continuity planning?
Understanding business continuity planning and its importance is key to your organization’s resilience when disaster strikes. Business continuity planning is developing strategies to keep critical business functions running during and after an event.
It includes assessing risks to identify threats, conducting a business impact analysis to prioritize critical functions, and developing a business continuity plan to outline procedures for continuity.
Business continuity planning is important to reduce downtime, protect assets, and protect your organization’s reputation.
A good business continuity plan can help you respond better to crises, keep operations running, and reduce financial loss.
So, investing time and resources into developing and maintaining a good business continuity plan is crucial for your business’s long-term resilience and viability.
Goals and objectives of business continuity planning
To do business continuity planning, you must identify the specific goals and objectives to ensure operational resilience during an event.
The main goal of business continuity planning is to maintain or rapidly restore critical business functions so the organization can continue to operate even in a crisis or business disruption.
By identifying these critical functions, you can develop strategies in the business continuity planning suite to plan to maintain capacity or operate at reduced capacity if needed.
The goals include processes and procedures to recover quickly, reduce downtime, and reduce financial loss.
Rapid recovery of key functions is key to the business continuity plan, so the organization can get through tough times while maintaining continuity and reputation.
Prioritizing, identifying, and preserving critical business functions is the foundation of a good business continuity strategy.
Responsibility 2: Critical Business Functions
When identifying critical business functions, you must assess risks and impacts to determine their importance.
A business impact analysis will help you identify these critical functions so you can prioritize in your own business continuity strategies and planning.
Understanding the importance of these functions will help you develop strategies to keep operations and systems running during disruptions.
Assessing risks and impacts on critical business functions
Assessing risks and impacts on critical business functions means conducting a thorough assessment to identify potential threats to operations.
To assess risks and impacts, follow these steps:
- Risk Assessment: Start by identifying potential threats to critical business functions. Assess the likelihood of these risks and the impact on operations.
- Impact Analysis: Once you have identified the risks, analyze how each threat will impact critical business functions. Understanding the consequences will enable you to develop targeted strategies to mitigate those risks.
- Prioritise Areas: Identify the most at-risk business areas and prioritize them in the business continuity plan. By focusing on critical functions, you can develop targeted strategies to maintain continuity in key operations.
Business impact analysis to identify critical functions
Conduct a thorough business impact analysis to identify critical functions to keep operations running during disruptions.
The business impact analysis (BIA) will identify the core functions essential to keep operations running during an event. By doing a BIA, you can determine the key processes and activities that must continue to keep the business running.
Also, the BIA will help establish or update the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO), key metrics in the disaster recovery planning process. Understanding these objectives will allow you to set realistic targets to get operations back up and running after an incident.
By identifying critical business functions through data center the BIA, you can focus resources and efforts on the most critical operations so you can prioritize recovery strategies.
Regularly updating the RTO and RPO based on the business impact analysis is key to operational resilience and preparedness for potential disruptions.
Responsibility 3: Business Continuity Plan
Key stakeholders must be involved in the planning process when developing a full business continuity plan (BCP). This will ensure that all perspectives and business partners are considered and roles are defined.
Business continuity plan elements
A full business continuity plan will include essential functions, recovery procedures, communication plans, business impact analysis (BIA), and a risk management and assessment (RA to address the risks and threats. When developing your business continuity plan, make sure it includes the following:
- Critical Business Operations: Identify and prioritize the most critical functions that must continue during a disruption to keep the minimal operational impact.
- Recovery Procedures: Detailed step-by-step instructions on how to get business back up and running quickly and efficiently after a disaster or interruption.
- Communication Plans: Clear internal and external communication protocols during a crisis to quickly inform all stakeholders.
Stakeholders in the planning process
Involving stakeholders in planning is key to a full Business Continuity Plan. Engage employees, customers, suppliers, organizations, and investors to gain insight into potential risks and practical recovery strategies.
Regular meetings and communications with stakeholders are critical to keeping the plan in sync with changing expectations and dynamic business environments. By involving stakeholders in the strategic planning process, you will ensure all perspectives are considered, making the plan more effective and adaptable.
Stakeholders will help identify risks, shape recovery strategies, and maintain open communication throughout the planning process.
Their input will help address company-specific challenges, anticipate changing business environments, and foster a collaborative approach to business continuity.
Responsibility 4: Implement and Test the Business Continuity Plan
Tasks are assigned according to the plan’s roles to ensure the Business Continuity Plan is implemented successfully.
Test the plan regularly through drills and exercises.
Review the plan annually to keep it up to date.
Implementing the business continuity plan
Developing a full plan to implement and test your Business Continuity Plan involves:
- Roles:
Clearly define who is responsible for each part of the plan, including communication, resource management, and recovery procedures. - Timelines:
Set clear deadlines for implementing each part of the plan to ensure timely execution and preparedness. - Communication and Training:
Communicate the plan regularly to all employees and stakeholders and train and raise awareness.
Testing the plan to find weaknesses
Regularly testing your business continuity plan is critical to finding weaknesses and validating readiness for an interruption. By testing regularly, you can identify potential weaknesses in the plan and take action to fix them.
The feedback from these tests is gold dust, as it will tell you what needs improvement. Use this feedback to update the plan to remain relevant and effective during interruptions.
Testing the business continuity plan will help you find weaknesses. It is a practical exercise that simulates real-life scenarios, allowing you to see how your organization and employees react to unexpected events.
Responsibility 5: Business Continuity
To maintain an effective business continuity plan, you must update the plan regularly to align with current business needs.
Reviewing and refining the strategy after an interruption will ensure the plan remains relevant and robust.
Monitor and update the plan to address new risks and challenges.
Update the business continuity plan for current business needs
Regularly updating the business continuity plan will keep it aligned with current business needs and ready for interruption.
To keep the plan relevant and working, follow these steps:
- Schedule Regular Reviews: Set up regular reviews to check the plan is relevant to the current business environment.
- Incorporate Lessons Learned: Update the plan based on feedback from stakeholders and lessons learned from past interruptions.
- Adapt to Change: Consider changes to the plan to reflect changes to your business structure or operations.
Reviewing the strategy after an interruption
After an interruption, reviewing the business continuity strategy is vital to see how it worked and what can be improved.
This review should involve key stakeholders to fully understand how the business continuity and disaster recovery plans were executed during the interruption.
Assess the plan’s implementation, determining what went wrong and what needs fixing. Ensure the disruption review covers all plan parts, from communication protocols to resource allocation.
Communication with all parties involved is critical to determining what worked and what can be improved. Continuous improvement is key to improving your business continuity plans for the next interruption.
FAQs
What are the 5 parts of a business continuity plan?
You should know the five parts of a business continuity plan: scope, strategy, roles, communication, and training. These are the keys to a working, solid business continuity plan.
What are the 4 Ps of BCP?
When thinking of the 4 Ps of BCP, remember Risk Management, Business Impact Analysis (BIA), Recovery Strategies, and Testing and evaluation. Identifying threats, understanding impacts, planning for a recovery strategy, and testing readiness are the key components of a continuity plan.
What is in a BCP plan?
A BCP plan includes objectives, strategy, roles, communication protocols, training, testing, updating based on feedback, and risk assessments, management, threats, impacts, controls, monitoring, and BIA for prioritization and relevance.
What should a BCM plan have?
A BCM plan should include scope, objectives, and recovery goals. It should also align with business strategy, assign roles, develop communication, train regularly, test the plan, and update based on feedback.
Risks should be managed by identifying threats, evaluating impacts, implementing controls, and monitoring.
Summary
A well-designed Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is key to your organization’s resilience in times of crisis. You can reduce risk and minimize disruption by identifying critical business functions, creating a plan, implementing and testing it regularly, and maintaining it.
Align to business strategy, assign roles, and prioritize disaster recovery plan based on impacts. Test, evaluate, and update
Chris Ekai is a Risk Management expert with over 10 years of experience in the field. He has a Master’s(MSc) degree in Risk Management from University of Portsmouth and is a CPA and Finance professional. He currently works as a Content Manager at Risk Publishing, writing about Enterprise Risk Management, Business Continuity Management and Project Management.