Business Continuity is quickly becoming a more common facet of business management as organizations become more interconnected and the threat of disasters increase. Weather-related disasters are becoming more and more common, while the COVID-19 global pandemic continues to loom over the economy, disrupting supply chains and stretching reserve funds to the brink.
However, you can proactively combat these stressors for your organization by engaging in holistic, data-driven Business Continuity Management, the goal of which is to create a formally documented plan. It may seem simple, but before you can develop a useful, reactive Business Continuity Plan, you need to examine the critical processes underlying the normal operations of your organization.
Assemble a Crisis Management Team
You’re not crafting your Business Continuity Plan in a vacuum. It’s important to assemble a team of individuals from all components of your business. If possible, recruit at least one senior executive, a manager from each major department, and one or two critical employees.
Your Crisis Management Team will be tasked with the development and implementation stages of your Business Continuity Plan, so make sure to select individuals who are well-trained and are likely to remain with the company for the foreseeable future. Ideally, your team will have some form of training or experience in incident management.
Your team will spend time discussing their departmental goals, evaluating the company’s strategic plan (if applicable), and reviewing existing disaster- and recovery-related policies.
Once the initial planning stages are complete, your team will be prepped for implementation and empowered to lead their employees to maintain and carry out your Business Continuity Plan.
Identify Critical Business Processes
The core purpose of your Business Continuity Plan is achieving resilience in the face of disruption. To realize this goal, your Crisis Management Team will need to identify critical processes and the business objectives that are executed through those processes. This is where a strategic plan is especially useful.
Team members from each department should spend some time communicating their high-level responsibilities, day-to-day functions, regulatory requirements, common challenges, and successes to help familiarize the team with the different facets of the business. Getting all team members united and informed is an important part of the process.
Specifically, make sure to touch on the following resources and tools when engaging with critical processes as they apply to your organization:
Employee skills
IT infrastructure
Telecommunications
Manufacturing systems
Transportation vehicles
Accounting processes
Software
Facilities
Electronic data
Hard copy documents
In this planning stage, making data-backed decisions is critical, especially where cash flow and finances overlap with each process. Encourage your team to include key performance metrics when discussing how they measure success and failure. Incorporating this data into the planning process at this stage will help as you move forward into the Business Impact Analysis, specifically as you identify the Maximum Tolerable Outage (MTO) and the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for specific processes.
Establish a Strong Foundation
Your Business Continuity Plan will not be developed after one single planning session, so be sure not to rush these initial stages in order to move onto getting things on paper. Identifying your organization’s critical processes and the measurements you use to track their success is a foundational aspect of all the work that still lies ahead. You and your team will use the information gathered during this step at each future drafting stage, not to mention if and when disaster strikes.