While every company should have a business continuity plan in place, too many companies choose to defer setting one up until after a disaster has already happened. Intended to help businesses recover quickly after a disaster or other disruption, business continuity plans look to establish a list of potential risks and establish sets of procedures and guidelines for how to respond should one of those risks occur. To help ensure proper coverage, a business continuity plan will consider such topics as high level goals, key roles and stakeholders, critical tasks required for operations, and contact information for local emergency personal or management personnel. An article in Facility Executive considers these challenges and offers some tips.
While every company will require a customized plan, any organization can get a good start by following five steps:
- Establishing a business continuity team, involving at members from each department.
- Performing a business impact analysis, to determine critical threats or risks to the company.
- Determining any gaps between resources needed in the event of a risk, and the resources on hand.
- Developing recovery strategies, considering how the occurrence of each risk would affect or disrupt operations..
- Testing the plan, to ensure effectiveness, and ensure procedures are both up to date and understood by those expected to carry them out.
