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No matter how well your business is doing, disasters can happen that could jeopardise its progression. The question is, how do you protect your business’ continuity? The answer, a carefully developed business continuity plan.
What is Business Continuity Planning or ‘BCP’?
Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is the creation and development of a strategy through the recognition of threats and risks facing a company, with an eye to ensure that personnel and assets are protected and able to function in the event of a disaster. A business continuity plan (BCP) involves defining potential risks, determining how those risks will affect operations, implementing safeguards and procedures designed to mitigate those risks, testing those procedures to ensure that they work, and periodically reviewing the process to make sure that it is up to date.
Here are a few simple steps that contribute towards a Business Continuity Plan:
Step 1: Understand Your Business
The first and arguably most important step in BCP is to identify the elements that are critical to your business. This will ensure that you are focusing on what is important to continuing business operations.
Not sure how to identify critical elements? Ask yourself…
- Who are our main customers?
- What is our infrastructure such as IT support?
- Who are our key staff and suppliers that are needed to fulfil vital tasks?
- What are our most profitable products and services, and the processes needed to produce them?
Step 2: Measure the Risk
Once you have identified the areas of your business that are most critical to operational continuity, you need to measure the risk posed to each of these key business elements in different threatening scenarios.
- Likelihood of failure
- Impact on business
- Minimum period of failure that could be sustained
- The worst case scenario
Step 3: Create a Strategy
Now that you have successfully considered the most important areas to your business and completed a risk assessment, you need to consider how you will cope with these situations by deciding on your immediate and your long-term responses.
Immediate Response
- Evacuation procedures
- First aid
- Movement of crowds and meeting points
- Support for the most vulnerable areas of your business
- Delegate the normal duties of those in charge.
Long-Term Response
- Access to documents and IT facilities
- Move to alternative facilities
- Procedures for re-introduction of standard operations
- Arrangements for order completion, financial transactions and production
Step 4: Construct your Business Continuity Plan
Once you have completed all of the tasks above, you need to put together your plan and then continually practise, practise practise so that you are entirely prepared in the event of a disaster happening.
If everything you have read above seems a bit overwhelming to you, we can work with you to identify processes that are critical to your business so that you can run your business as usual. We offer a full range of Business Continuity Planning & Consultancy Services, aligned to ISO 22301 and the Business Continuity Institutes (BCI) Good Practice Guide.
See our Business Continuity Planning page for more information on our BCP services or get in touch to book your FREE session with one of our consultants.
