What Makes a Good Business Continuity Plan And How You Can Start Planning Yours

If you’ve been in business for any length of time, you know that sometimes unexpected events happen and can adversely affect your organization. The COVID-19 pandemic is a great example of a crisis that was both unexpected and that many businesses had no plan in place to mitigate.  

Of course, unexpected events can include everything from infrastructure failure to natural disasters, cyberattacks to political upheaval, and even your business dealing with a financial crisis. The one thing they have in common is severely affecting your ability to do business with the potential to cause huge problems and financial issues.  

That’s where a good business continuity plan comes into play. But what does that look like, and how can it help when facing an unexpected event? How do you make a business continuity plan that ensures you can, even at a reduced level, keep operating to the best of your abilities? We look at some steps you can take. 

What is a business continuity plan (BCP)?

As the name suggests, a BCP is a contingency plan for how a business will respond to an unexpected event, a disaster, or an unplanned disruption to part or all of its services. It goes further than any disaster recovery plan you may have encountered (or put together), and can cover contingencies for any part of your business operations that may be affected. 

A business continuity plan will usually center around a series of checklists for each part of your business, often in order of priority. This means that you, or the designated staff members, can work their way through your plan and check tasks off the list as they are completed. You likely made a solid plan on how to build your business, so why not one to protect it?  

Your plan should identify who has responsibility for what and which external providers or agencies should be contacted in the event of any crisis. It should also focus on short-term ability to restart operations and also the longer-term plans if the crisis is prolonged.  

One of the main parts of any business continuity plan you put together is a disaster recovery plan that focuses on key aspects of your infrastructure, particularly IT-related areas such as networks, desktop computers or laptops, mobile devices, and so on. The idea is to establish some level of productivity as quickly as possible.  

You should have three primary aims as part of your BCP:

• Availability: being able to access and use some or all critical applications and/or systems that allow for some productivity to be restored.
• Operations: being able to continue day-to-day operations to as high a degree of normality as possible. This should cover scheduled outages for maintenance as well as unexpected events. 
• Recovery: if any of your data has been affected, you should be accessing backups from other sites or from the cloud. 

Things to include in a good business continuity plan

If you are going to formulate an effective BCP, there are some things you should always consider including. Of course, businesses will differ in what’s needed to operate effectively and the resources required to make their BCP work. However, the following steps are ones that most businesses should be looking at. 

1.   Personnel 

This should be your first task when putting together a business continuity plan. Your BCP team should consist of people who are best placed to handle the various tasks that need to be done. Make sure you consider the various skills and experience of team members.  

Ask yourself the following questions:

• What tasks need to be prioritized in order to resume operations?
• Which members of staff are normally responsible for different areas of your operations?
• Can those staff members play a role in getting you up and running and do any of them have the technical skills required for tech recovery?
• Are they contactable in an emergency and could easily reach your site?
• Can you (or one of your management team) fill the role of coordinator?
• Can you identify substitutes for each role needed? 

Your coordinator is the most important role in your business continuity plan team. It’s their job to make decisions on the ground and to initiate any protocols you have in place. They also have to communicate with other team members as well as external partners and agencies such as small business phone services, data centers, and even your insurance company. 

2.   Risk assessment 

The first role of your team is to identify risks and effects that may be caused by any event. That can include both internal and external threats and what effects those threats may have on your business. By planning for possible events that could happen, they can analyze the potential impacts. While they can’t plan for every event, they can cover most outcomes.  

This analysis, known as a business impact analysis (BIA), is the foundation of any plan you put together.  

Your BIA can help highlight not only potential risks but the strengths and weaknesses of your infrastructure and your company as a whole. It can also identify any projected recovery time as well as an estimate of any financial losses caused by an event. 

3.   Prevention

As the saying goes, prevention is better than a cure. Your BIA may highlight areas where you are currently weak and where preventative measures can be taken. For example, with cybercrime on the rise, how susceptible are you to cyberattacks? Your BCP should then look at possible preventative measures such as upgrading your current cybersecurity.  

A good business continuity plan is not just about fixing things after an event; they are also about identifying what resources you have in place already to prevent or mitigate the effects of any event. This can include backing up data to the cloud.  

Knowing what safeguards and alternatives are already in place helps you identify what gaps there are in your ‘protection’. You can either then fill these gaps to increase your protection or have protocols in place when affected by any event. Identification of gaps and taking steps to have safeguards in place can play a major role in your business continuity plan. 

4.   Design protocols 

Of course, you can’t prevent every adverse effect that may happen. The next step in creating an efficient BCP is to design protocols for your team to follow when they need to. Your team can’t be expected to remember every component of your plan, especially when it comes to more complex aspects of it, so having written protocols is essential.  

You should also remember that having a disaster recovery plan is something that is both separate from, but also integral to, your BCP. Your business continuity team should recognize what responses are needed and whether the entire BCP plan needs to be implemented. Having documented protocols for your team to follow means that the process can be smooth. 

Your protocols should recognize trigger events and should also prioritize the most important functions of your business to focus on. For example, if you have a power outage (and have backup generators), their first priority should be to ensure that critical functions have power supplied to them.  

Consider what built-in protocols your team’s platforms come with as well. If you use SaaS tools like virtual contact center software, accounting software, or appointment booking software, there’s every chance it includes disaster recovery protocols. These are designed to increase uptime and protect data in case of an unexpected event, so while you don’t need to create the protocols yourself, you should still document them for your team’s reference.

5.   Implementing protocols

If your protocols are written properly, with priorities identified and checklists in place, then implementing your business continuity plan protocols should be straightforward. Depending what your primary aims are, achieving them should be relatively simple. It’s a case of each member of the team knowing what they are responsible for and how to do it. 

If you’re unsure how to put together a BCP, then you will find plenty of templates online. These can give you a framework you can base your plan on. You can then adapt that template to any particular needs you have or problems you may face. Before you know it, the crisis will have passed, and you’ll be back to working out how to create a lead magnet. 

In most cases, the process of implementing protocols will start with your team coordinator. They will normally issue the first call to action that alerts other team members to an event that has happened. With a documented plan, each team member can then implement the protocols relevant to them. This does not always need to happen in situ and can sometimes be done remotely. 

The takeaway

As mentioned, you can’t plan for every eventuality but you can plan for those most likely to happen. By having a solid BCP in place, you can have confidence that most—if not all—adverse effects can be mitigated when an event occurs. 

Once your plan is in place, run BCP mock drills to test how prepared your team is and how well your protocols have been implemented. These can be done in-person or virtually, with or without warning. Use them to test emergency preparedness for the crises you’ve identified as being most likely to happen, whether that’s a power cut, accident, cyberattack, or natural disaster. 

If you don’t have a BCP in place, then now is the time to look at creating one. Many businesses were caught unawares by the pandemic and either did not have a plan for coping with such a crisis or had insufficient protocols in place. Even maintaining some level of operations is better than facing a complete shutdown as a result of recession or other crisis.