Fear? Not If You Use a Business Continuity Plan The Right Way!

Here, 11 steps to Start Building A Business Continuity Plan You Always Wanted and also helps to Develop an Effective Business Continuity measures

Few of the key steps are listed below:

1. A clear understanding of the Business and scope of operations (including geographical spread)
2. Where is the organization ‘positioned’ in the “Business Chain?”
•    Am I a Service Provider / Supplier / Customer / Goods Producer etc.?
•    Understand the significance (i.e. the importance or seriousness)
3. Assign - Roles and Responsibilities of BC Team (to name a few)
•    Overall BC structure
•    Incident Response Team
•    Damage Assessment Team
•    Operations Recovery Team
•    Recovery Support Team
•    Partners, Vendors Support
•    People identified to perform BIA, RA, etc
4. Perform Business Impact Analysis (BIA) on key business processes (BIA is done Identify potential financial and non-financial impacts due to disruption in performing an activity/process and to arrive at Recovery Time frames)
•    Identify key business processes
• If a process has a significant impact on (any one of the below attributes), then the process is taken up for BIA
• Business Objectives / Financial loss in case of disruption / Regulatory issues / Impact on Customers / Vendor Relation / Employee Morale
•   Impact of the incident/disaster
• customer deliverables / brand, reputation /  organization assets / compromise on intellectual property / staff, associates / Legal or regulatory impact
5. Risk Analysis (RA)
•    On enablers (or drivers), stepwise of each of the key business processes
•    On General threats like (Flood, Fire, Civil unrest, etc)
•    On specific threats as identified in the organization’s context (i.e the environment in which the organization operates)
6. Decide on Recovery Strategy (based on 4 & 5)
7. Arrive at resources needed to execute BCP (manpower, IT infra, Physical infra, Vendor support, monetary support, etc)
8. BCP (Business Continuity Plan) Document captures a sequence of actions that counteracts the risk that has materialized covering 6 Rs
•    Reduce the impact of the incident
•    Response (immediate) - containment along with other actions
•    Recover critical processes or services at the defined recovery site
•    Resume critical services from the recovery site
•    Restore primary site (if possible and feasible cost-wise also)
• Else continue and establish operations at the recovery site permanently.
•    Return to the primary site and start conducting business as usual
9. Communication Plan to
•    Employees including their emergency contacts
•    Customers, Suppliers, Vendors and Service Providers
•    Shareholders, Board
•    Regulatory authorities
•    General public
•    Media (Print Media, TV, etc)
10. Training and Awareness on BCP to staff, associates, vendors
11. BCP exercising and Testing
•    Call Tree
•    Table Top
•    Full systematic walk-through
•    Part simulation
•    Learningial simulation
•    Full  and Improving

When to invoke BCP 

1. The occurrence of an event (say civil unrest)
2. Monitor the situation (the event is beginning to have a minor impact on the organization’s business)
3. Event is unpredictable – either it can fall flat or blow up large scale
4. Staff monitoring the situation - passes on developments to the BCMS team.
5. Upon reaching a threshold, based on ground reality – BCP is invoked to prevent large scale disruption.

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