A business continuity plan is something that every business owner should consider to have. We can have a solid company, but that doesn’t keep us safe from disaster events.
For example, we are currently facing a pandemic, that no one could anticipate. This situation has forced many businesses to shut down or in the best cases to reinvent themselves in order to stay afloat.
That’s why it is so important to establish a business continuity plan. Let’s start for the beginning: What is a business continuity plan?
Is the outline of procedures to prevent damage, maintain productivity, and recover in events such as national emergencies, natural disasters, or even a human error that can cost an interruption of a company operations.
Business continuity plans should include all the processes that need to be performed if a major business disruption occurs.
Most importantly, by creating this plan you will identify possible scenarios and then proactively determine what you can do to get the business back on track.
No matter how big or small your business is, if you have more than 1 employee to rely on, you need a continuity plan. Think about the current Covid-19 contingency where the safety of the employees can be affected.
It’s vital to retain current customers while increasing your customer base.
Firstly, your company’s future depends on your people and processes. Being able to handle any incident effectively can have a positive effect on your company’s reputation and market value, and it can increase customer confidence.
Therefore, when you stay ahead and plan for such crisis you will help your business to stay in the market; and that’s what we all want, right?
Now, learn the 5 steps to building an effective business continuity plan:
- Create a team
Just like the Marketing team or the Sales team, you require a Business continuity plan team. You will trust these people to help you keep your business in the market.
In addition, this team will split into two sub-functions:
- The Command Center team: These are the incident response team, crisis, and recovery management teams. The people involved here consist of Information officers, program managers and coordinators, executive managers, service desk managers, and communications managers.
- The Task-Oriented team: This team is made up of public relations, legal, procurement, cybersecurity, IT service desk, and communications teams.
- Conduct a Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
Now you need to understand the operational, financial, and physical risks for your company if a disruption occurs.
Impact analysis helps companies identify specific risks and threats to operations, financial performance, reputation, employees, and supply chains. A BIA is a great starting point for risk identification and assessment.
A good way of doing it is by having your team brainstorm a list of risks and threats to your business. Once you’ve created a list of potential risks, discuss how these risks could affect operations.
A business impact analysis is key to gathering the information needed to develop mitigation strategies and recovery plans.
- Identify resources needed
Start by identifying the key resources of each department in your company. Further, narrow down on the critical ones without which your business cannot function smoothly.
Now, establish contact points with these key resources, as multiple teams in your organization, might be dependent on them for their operations. Ensure that the contact information is up-to-date.
- Implement recovery strategies
With all the information from the previous stages, you can implement recovery strategies to decide the various business areas and critical functions that will be covered under your business continuity plan.
This should include:
- The objectives of the business continuity plan.
- Information about the business continuity team members, their roles, and responsibilities.
- Key resources and critical functions involved in the business continuity plan.
- Business Impact Analysis report.
- Prevention, response, mitigation, and recovery strategies.
- Review and test your plan
Testing lets you identify the gaps and flaws in your plan. A business continuity plan is never truly finished since a company risks and requirements are never set in stone. Rather, they change and adapt as the business grows.
Most importantly, It’s always a good idea to test your business continuity plan to make sure it is effective, observe results, and make recommendations for improvement.
On the other hand, besides a business continuity plan, you will also need to count with the right tools that will guarantee that your business stays on the market.
In that matter, we suggest Freshservice a cloud-based ITSM tool.
Freshservice is an IT Service desk. Simple, efficient, runs like clockwork, and is completely personalized to your company’s needs.
You can standardize processes and service delivery with an ITIL-aligned setup. Above all, it’s intuitive systems that automate mundane tasks, let you plan and track effectively and keep your whole team on the same page.
In addition, its advanced metrics give you constant insight that lets you improve performance, identify problems, and plan based on successes.
Gb Advisors is a Leading Software Solutions company devoted to the advisory and implementation of ITSM and Digital Security solutions. We hold a client portfolio of more than 400 customers in over 30 countries.
Our personnel’s expertise and the quality of our services have resulted in a rapid increase in the demand for our solutions. Are you ready to be our next client and find the right solution for your business needs? Contact us.
