A Business Continuity (BC) plan is a great way to reduce your company’s risk profile by documenting the approach you’ll take if your business is impacted by an unplanned event. Without a BC plan in place, your business is forced to react to an event instead of using a documented and tested plan. A BC plan will save your business money from unplanned downtime, and it will also give your clients the confidence that your business is resilient when the unexpected occurs.
- Start with a communication framework for your company. Regardless of the size of your business, document who is responsible for communicating to your staff, so you know that everyone is receiving updates as the situation changes. Typically, this mirrors your company’s organizational structure where managers are responsible for communicating with their staff. Managers must make sure they have current contact information for their staff and the capability to send updates to them as things change. For any communication, you should ensure staff are receiving the updates. For example, you may communicate to staff via text message groups. In each text update, you should ask staff to confirm that they’ve received the update.
- Think about potential risks that are impactful to your company. It’s best to start with broad categories of risks and be more specific over time. For example, if your office is closed due to an adverse weather event, you’ll need staff to operate from home until the office is accessible again.
- Document the strategies for business to continue until the business can resume normal operations for each risk you’ve identified. If your office is closed due to an adverse weather event, your staff will need to work from home. Do they have the required equipment and information to do this? Has the adverse weather impacted their ability to work from home? If staff are unable to work from home, how is your business impacted by some staff being able to work from home or being unable to work effectively from home? These are a few examples of what you’ll need to think about as you build out your plan.
- Communicate the plan to your staff. It’s critical that staff understand your plan and have access to it when there is an issue. It’s a good idea to store your plan securely online where staff can access it and key staff have an offline copy in the event you don’t have access to your online data.
- Test your plan. There’s no better way to improve your plan by doing tests with your staff on the different documented scenarios. Think of a timeline to test your different risk scenarios and after each test you should allocate time to update your plan and communicate the changes to your staff. An annual BC plan test is a good way to keep staff current on the plan and keep staff involved in the execution of your BC plan.
Keep in mind that building an effective BC plan takes time and is an iterative process. Your initial BC plan maybe a simple plan that focuses on how to communicate with your staff and one or two risks this is a great first step. Continue to build on this over time, so you and your staff continually reduce the risk to your business.
If you need help getting started on your BC plan, then contact The SMB CIO today.