How to Develop a Business Continuity Plan

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There are 5 steps to developing a business continuity plan:

Make a list of the critical services in priority order and consider where you may be vulnerable. Think about:

• What are the key activities of your business?
• Who in the organisation is essential?
• Which staff and systems are necessary for the delivery of products or services.
• What IT, equipment or other systems are needed to function properly?
• Who do you depend on or who depends on you to provide a service?
• Are there any service level agreements, legal or regulatory obligations on the organisation?

Having identified the resources needed to deliver your key activities it is important to consider the likelihood that these resources would be lost. Anticipate and assess the risks to your organisation, formulating a list of where your business is vulnerable, for example: staff, processes or technology.

Think about:

• How likely is an event to happen?
• What effect would it have on your  business?
• What factors can reduce the likelihood or effect or mitigate the risk entirely?

Now the risks and key services have been identified, you have to decide to manage these risks.  Your strategy will determine:

• How you can reduce and even eliminate risks.
• How you recover from disruptive incidents.

Options could include:

• Having an agreement with other local organisations for assistance.
• Attempting to get temporary back-up accommodation.

A simple generic plan should provide a list of actions to enable you to continue your services. It should take the following into consideration:

• Roles & Responsibilities
• Incident Checklist for Key Staff
• Service Delivery
• Recovery Procedures
• Communications & Information
• Plan Management & Exercising

Testing and rehearsing your plan is one of the fundamental areas of contingency planning. It gives you an opportunity to test the arrangements and principles of the plan in a “safe” environment, without risk to the business. Exercising should involve: validating plans; rehearsing key staff; and testing systems which are relied upon to deliver resilience. Testing ensures that plans are robust and enables lessons to be learnt and amendments to be made. Plans should be reviewed regularly and kept up to date, especially if there are staff changes, changes in the organisation's functions or services, changes to the organisational structure or changes in details of suppliers or contractors.