How to Write a Simple Business Continuity Plan

Examples and templates of business continuity plans are a useful starting point for any organization. However, they should only be used as a sample of a BCP. The detail must be elaborated by the organization taking into account its own circumstances. The BCP should contain all the details required for successful execution. The plan must be easily accessible to all employees, regardless of where they are. Robust and realistic testing with a number of different scenarios is the secret to success in business continuity planning. You may never be able to plan for all the possible disruptions – or their combinations – but it`s worth a try. Don`t assume that your first plan will work. You need to make sure that you have backup plans and backup plans for your backup plans. Consider each factor that could play a role and assume that at some point everything will go wrong. This page provides the steps for writing a business continuity plan and an explanation of the key components of a plan. You`ll also find a quickstart template for the business continuity plan and a quick reference map template for disruptive incidents for print or mobile, as well as a checklist for preparing experts for emergencies.

A business continuity plan is an important document. It must be under formal control of the documents, each update being assigned a version number. A list of release numbers and release dates should be included in each iteration of the business continuity plan, along with a list of approvers and approval dates. A lot of effort is being put into creating a BC plan and testing it first. Once this work is complete, some organizations leave the plan in place, while other more critical tasks attract attention. When this happens, plans become obsolete and are of no use when they are needed. Creating a business continuity plan probably isn`t the funniest day you`ll have at work. But it`s an essential part of running a resilient business, and it`s important that you, your business continuity team, and the rest of your employees take this seriously. The Operational and Financial Impacts worksheet can be used to collect this information as described in Business Impact Assessment.

The worksheet must be completed by managers of operational functions and processes with sufficient knowledge of the company. Once all worksheets are completed, spreadsheets can be tabulated: Business Continuity Management monitors a company`s continuity plan and makes necessary changes as needed. This type of management determines the potential threats to an organization and how each of these threats can affect business functions. Based on this information, Business Continuity Management is able to optimize the business continuity plan to deal with potential new threats. Creating a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) involves building a team, reviewing key risks and tasks, and selecting recovery activities. Then, write the plan as a set of lists and guidelines that can handle risks such as fires, floods, pandemics, or data breaches. When you`re aware of your risk and know what needs to be done to keep the business running, you want to get started. This alone gives you a competitive advantage and helps reduce the associated financial risk. A business crisis can cost your business a lot of money and ruin your reputation if you`re not proactively prepared to deal with it. Customers are not very lenient, especially when a crisis is affected by accidents in the company or other avoidable mistakes.

If you want your business to be able to maintain business continuity in the face of a crisis, you need to develop a plan to maintain its core functions. You should constantly review the plan to make sure it is up to date with your current business processes. The larger your business, the more complex your systems will be, which means you should review your business continuity plan more frequently to ensure that no gaps are overlooked. When creating your plan, consider interviewing key people in organizations that have successfully gone through a disaster. People usually like to share “war stories” and the steps and techniques (or clever ideas) that saved the day. Your ideas could prove incredibly valuable in helping you create a solid plan. Your biggest customer goes bankrupt and reduces your annual recurring revenue by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Did this customer account for the majority of your sales and you considered them safe, or did you separate yourself from this loss with other sources of income? How will you adapt to lost sales, where will you cut the budget and have a concrete plan to protect yourself from employee layoffs? Because IT recovery is critical for most organizations, many disaster recovery solutions are available. You can rely on IT to implement these solutions.

But what about the rest of your business functions? The future of your business depends on your people and processes. Being able to effectively handle any incident can have a positive impact on your company`s reputation and market value, and increase customer trust. Depending on your business and its level of risk, each brand presents different main threats to the status quo. That`s why risk assessments before creating a business continuity plan can be so helpful. Then, when you create your entire plan, you can rest more easily at night. Once everyone in your organization is familiar and trained to implement this plan, you have peace of mind that all won`t be lost in the event of a disaster. Management is also essential to promote user awareness. If employees don`t know the plan, how can they respond appropriately when every minute counts? While distribution and training of the plan can be done by business unit managers or HR staff, let someone from above start the training and emphasize its importance.

This will have a greater impact on all employees and give the plan more credibility and urgency. You need to rigorously test a plan to know if it is complete and serves its purpose. In fact, O`Donnell suggests that you try to break it. “Don`t go for a simple scenario; Make it always believable, but challenging. This is the only way to improve. Also, make sure the goals are measurable and stretch. Doing the minimum and `getting away with it` only leads to a weak plan and a lack of confidence in a real incident. A business continuity plan is a written document that describes how a business will operate in the event of an emergency. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) provides employers with a business continuity plan template. .