Developing a business continuity plan: a guide

What is a business continuity plan?

A business continuity plan (BCP) is a document to help your organization plan for and respond to crisis situations where business operations are disrupted. The idea is threefold : 

• minimizing the impact of such disruptions ; 
• ensuring that critical business functions can continue ; 
• if these functions are stopped, restoring them as quickly as possible. 

Creating a business continuity plan is all about identifying potential risks to your operations (natural disasters, cyberattacks, etc.) and understanding them so as to design effective solutions. In a similar fashion, your business processes will also be under scrutiny as you‘ll need to determine which ones are vital to your business, so that you can protect them better.

How to create your business continuity plan?

Conduct a business impact analysis (BIA)

This is the first step to any business continuity plan. The business impact analysis or BIA is a systematic approach that helps you identify and prioritize the critical business processes we mentioned previously. 

The second goal of a business impact analysis is to assess the potential impact of various disruptions on these functions. then, you’ll have the information you need to guide the development of your business continuity plan.

To obtain all of this information, you will have to review each function:

• the resources required to support them ;
• the potential consequences of their disruption. 

You can gather such data through interviews with key personnel, questionnaires, and a review of existing documentation. Don’t dwell too much on non-critical functions, your focus should be on what keeps your business afloat.

Once you have identified your critical business functions, you can determine the recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) for each function. The RTO refers to the maximum amount of time that a business process can be disrupted before it causes unacceptable harm to your organization. The RPO, on the other hand, defines the maximum amount of data that can be lost before it impacts your business operations. These objectives will be the foundation upon which you will build your recovery strategies.

Develop disaster recovery strategies

These are the specific actions and resources you will use to restore your critical business functions within the recovery time objective (RTO).

Depending on the risks you found during your BIA, you’ll have a few options to consider. For example, you might establish a secondary data center in a different geographic location to ensure that your IT systems and data can be quickly restored. Alternatively, you might implement cloud-based data backups to protect against data loss in case of a cyber-attack or hardware failure.

Aside from technical recovery strategies, you should ask yourself how you will maintain business operations if key personnel are unavailable due to a disaster. Have you considered cross-training team members so that they can perform multiple roles? Should you develop a plan for temporarily relocating employees to a different office or remote work environment?

Third aspect to integrate to your recovery strategies: how to communicate with customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders during a disruption? You could explore setting up an emergency contact information system or developing pre-written messages that can be quickly disseminated in the event of a crisis.

Create detailed response procedures

The purpose of detailed response procedures is outlining the specific actions that team members should take once the operations are disrupted. This distinct section of your business continuity plan should be easily accessible to all relevant personnel.

When designing your response procedures, include a wide range of potential scenarios, once again, depending on the risks you identified in your BIA.. Don’t limit yourself to most likely scenarios: without overdoing it, feel free to challenge what you deem likely or unlikely.

For each scenario, you should provide clear instructions on how to respond: 

• who is responsible for each action ; 
• what resources are required ; 
• the steps that need to be taken to restore critical business functions.

Example:  if your organization relies heavily on a data center to support its operations, then your response procedures should detail how to recover data and restore information systems in the event of a cyber-attack. 

Beside technical response procedures, you also need to manage the human side of a crisis. We already talked about communication with external stakeholders but maybe it would be wise to also create: 

• safety procedures for your employees ;
• emergency communication plan to keep team members informed.

Allocate necessary resources

To carry out your business continuity plan, you will need resources. Both physical assets, such as backup servers and emergency supplies, as well as human resources, such as trained personnel. Of course, funds are also a major part of the equation, should you decide, for instance, to rely on third-party vendors who provide emergency services. However, as you know, resources are finite. So you have to make decisions on how much is to be spent on each recovery strategy and response procedure.

Another key aspect of resource allocation is the effort and the measures to maintain these resources over time, otherwise, there is simply no point in continuity planning in the first place. Let’s say your plan includes data backups, then you need to make sure these backups are regularly updated and tested, because if they are not reliable, this is just a waste of your resources. Similarly, if your plan involves relocating employees to a different office, you will need to ensure that this office is properly equipped and maintained.

Update the plan

In the same spirit, as your organization evolves and new risks emerge, you will need to update your BCP accordingly. Creating a business continuity plan is not a one-time task; it requires ongoing attention and updates to remain effective and relevant:

• periodic BIA to identify new critical business functions ;
• an overhaul of your recovery strategies whenever you significantly modify your IT infrastructure (example: you add an offsite backup server for your customer data) ;
• new regulations always call for updates to your BCP (Example: when GDPR was introduced in the EU). 

How to ensure the quality of a business continuity plan?

Training and awareness

What is the use of a continuity plan if there is no one to execute it? During a crisis, you want to be able to count on team members who are trained to their roles and responsibilities.  

Just like everything else, this training should be an ongoing process with regular drills and exercises, not a one-off session and we’ll see what happens when the disruption occurs.

You are not the only one who needs to be on-board with training, it’s essential to raise awareness of the business continuity plan throughout your organization, otherwise it will probably not be taken seriously by your employees and your BCP will be thus rendered useless. Here are a few examples of what you can do about it : 

• conducting regular briefings with the management team ; 
• distributing copies of the plan to key personnel ; 
• ensuring that everyone has access to the contact information they will need during a disruption.

Regular testing

No BCP quality assurance without testing. Indeed, testing allows you to identify any weaknesses or gaps in the plan and provides an opportunity to refine the plan based on real-world scenarios.

You have several testing options:

• tabletop exercises: key personnel gather to discuss how they would respond to a hypothetical disruption. Beyond helping to identify potential issues with the plan it provides an opportunity for everyone to familiarize themselves with their roles and responsibilities ;
• full-scale simulations: in this kind of test, your organization actually goes through the steps of executing the business continuity plan. Full-scale can be particularly valuable for identifying issues that might not be apparent in a tabletop exercise, such as communication breakdowns or logistical challenges.

Regardless of the type of test you conduct, it’s important to document the results and use them to inform any necessary updates to your business continuity plan.

Audit your BCP: reviews and updates

As we already discussed, regularity is an absolute prerequisite to any effective BCP. 

During your review process, you should consider whether the plan still reflects your current business processes, critical business functions, and recovery time objectives. You should also evaluate whether the resources and strategies outlined in the plan are still sufficient to support your recovery efforts.

If you identify any areas where the plan needs to be updated, it’s important to make these changes promptly and communicate them to every concerned staff member:  

• updating contact information ; 
• revising response procedures, 
• adjusting your recovery strategies to reflect changes in internal or external risks.

Don’t forget to involve your management team in the review and update process. Their input is valuable for understanding the broader strategic objectives of the organization and how the BCP stands in that picture. Moreover, involving senior leadership helps reinforce the importance of the plan throughout the organization, it sets an example of resilience and preparedness.

Leveraging feedback and lessons learned after incidents and test scenarios

Another way to enhance the quality of your business continuity plan is to incorporate feedback and lessons learned from real incidents or previous tests. Whenever your organization experiences a disruption – minor or a major – you might want to perform a post-incident review where you tackle the following topics:

• What happened?
• How was the business continuity plan executed? 
• What could be improved (and how)?

Gather feedback from team members who were involved in the response. They can provide precious insights into areas where the plan may need to be adjusted. You can also gather feedback from debriefing sessions after test exercises and simulations. If you are looking for an efficient feedback framework that is quick to learn and implement, maybe consider giving SBI feedback a try.

Documenting changes and maintaining transparency

As you update your business continuity plan, it’s vital to keep detailed records of all changes made. This documentation serves two main purposes: 

• First, it provides a clear history of how the plan has evolved over time, which can be useful for understanding the rationale behind certain decisions or strategies.
• Second, it enables everyone in the organization to be aware of the most current version of the plan and the specific updates that have been made.

Maintaining transparency in the update process is just as important as documenting changes. All stakeholders, including team members, management, and any third-party vendors involved in the plan, should be informed about updates and how these changes affect their roles and responsibilities. 

Transparency is good for company wise trust but this is also a way to have everyone on the same page, which is essential for the effective execution of the business continuity plan during a real incident.

Using a business continuity plan template

A template provides a structured format with the benefit of including all critical elements within a single document:

• Contact information ; 
• Business impact analysis ; 
• Recovery strategies ; 
• Response procedures. 

This is particularly useful for organizations that are making their debut in crafting a BCP or those who need to ensure consistency across multiple locations or departments.

Just like a business plan template, while it can be a valuable tool, it’s important to customize it to your organization’s specific needs. Each business has its unique risks, critical functions and resources, so the template should be adapted to reflect these factors.

Engaging with external experts and vendors

In some cases, you may want to engage with external experts or vendors who specialize in business continuity and disaster recovery. Indeed, they can provide valuable insights, help you identify potential gaps in your plan, and offer recommendations for improvement. They can also assist with conducting more complex tests, such as full-scale simulations. 

And don’t underestimate how much they can help you with training with tailored business coaching programs.

Also, if your business relies on external partners, include them in your business continuity planning process. Remember that these stakeholders surely have their own BCP in place so you should absolutely check that their own procedures are compatible with yours. 

In crisis situations more than ever, communication is central. This is why you need to establish clear channels with your partners so that when everything else is disrupted, the flow of information remains unhindered.

Continuous improvement and adaptation

The final component of ensuring the quality of your business continuity plan is to embrace the continuous improvement philosophy. Business continuity is definitely not a static process; it requires ongoing attention and adaptation to changing circumstances. This means you’ll have to review procedures, incorporate feedback, learn from mistakes and get on top of the new trends ; all of this on a regular basis.

In summary, not unlike a battle plan, a BCP is a document indicating how the different layers of defense of your organization need to act and interact in order to restore the critical business functions as quickly as possible, and of course, to safeguard what has not been affected yet. There are many facets to consider to craft an effective business continuity plan: training and awareness, regular testing, continuous updates, feedback, regulatory requirements, templates and last but not least external experts.

At CoachYZ, we believe in the value of continuous improvement, as every company leader, every manager, every individual possesses a hidden untapped potential waiting to be revealed. If you want to be the best professional you can be, embark on your coaching journey with us!