How to prepare for uncertainty with a business continuity plan
With the current cost of living rising and a recession on its way, as well as unrest in Europe, many businesses are understandably facing a huge amount of uncertainty - which is coupled with the burden of likely cuts and difficult decisions next year. While most of these factors are outside businesses’ control, planning for uncertainty is key to surviving it - and this is where a business continuity plan comes in.
Pre-pandemic it was not uncommon for organisations to underestimate the cruciality of a business continuity plan - largely because no one notices its absence until a disaster like the pandemic strikes and it’s already too late. The pandemic taught us all the immense hurdles and costs unplanned interruption to business processes can cause, leading to a shift in attitude from businesses to explore processes to help deal with similar unexpected disasters in the future.
Whether it’s a complete shutdown of your IT systems, a major fire or flooding at a key facility, or something as simple as a power cut, with a business continuity plan in place, you are immediately armed to minimize the impact and damage of an unexpected event. In this article, our risk manager Johanna Barton will share what a business continuity plan is, why we took the first steps to create one at Blueprint and the key reasons you should too.
What is a business continuity plan?
At a very basic level, risk and continuity planning is about building business resilience and identifying the actions needed to maintain essential business processes and ensure recovery from operational threats. Nowadays, the terminology refers to a ‘Business Continuity System’ but this isn’t to be mistaken for software or an IT system; rather it is a combination of components that work together to achieve resilience. The plan will recognise that there is a whole host of elements that are required to successfully develop business continuity capability from leadership, risk management, documentation, exercising, approaches to learning and improving, communication and awareness – and more.
Building the blueprint business continuity plan
When we first set out on our business continuity journey, there were a couple of key drivers at play. Partially concerning our broader preparation for ISO 9001 accreditation, but also because we recognised the need to achieve more resilience as the company grows; both in terms of being less vulnerable to potentially disruptive events and to demonstrate to prospective clients that we can achieve continuity in the service we provide to them.
During the process, we realised that like many organisations we were significantly vulnerable to anything that affects our IT services and that we needed greater awareness of our key supplier’s business continuity plans. Outsourcing our IT systems and asking more direct questions when it came to liaising with our suppliers, were all key to improving our resilience and reassuring our clients.
What are the major benefits of a business continuity plan and why is it important?
There are many benefits that come out of the whole process and some are more obvious than others. The first is a more intimate understanding of your organisation and what resources and processes need to be prioritised if an unexpected disaster occurs. It can help you identify single points of failure you hadn’t previously recognised. An obvious and key output is more focus on evaluating your biggest risks and what you’re willing to do to address them. For example, outsourcing some essential services like it can be beneficial for smaller companies. It resilience and disaster recovery require a level of expertise many smaller organisations just don’t have in-house, due to costs.
The bottom line is about protecting revenue but a well-defined and communicated business continuity plan also means that when a disaster occurs, your team are clear on the role they need to play to maintain essential processes. Today, there is so much instability coming from different directions that Business Continuity planning should now be at the forefront of any leadership responsibilities.
The magic formula: the key steps to creating a business continuity plan
The first hurdle is to be sure your leadership team is committed to investing time, effort and potentially financial investment into the process, otherwise, it simply won’t get off the ground. Once you have this commitment, there’s a structure to follow and it starts with understanding the context your organisation operates in, both internally and externally to examine the types of threats that could arise.
The next step is to evaluate where your organisation has vulnerabilities that make those threats more likely to cause a significant problem. Business Impact Analysis is a method used to evaluate the key products and services an organisation needs to protect as well as the essential internal business processes and resources that need to be maintained to deliver them.
It’s also vital that you take a risk-based approach to plan resiliency measures. This is about understanding where you will get the most benefit from applying resource, effort and investment into protecting the things you have identified as being a priority. Most organisations have finite resources and need to know how best to use them.
Conclusion
Business continuity planning is a process every business should build into its operations. Boiled down, it’s about an honest examination of your business vulnerabilities and taking action to build resilience into the foundations of your organisation, as well as planning and organising better in the face of a disaster. The output will be unique to each business but in all instances, it is not just the document that is important, it’s the components of your continuity plan that fit together as a whole to achieve your business continuity capabilities that count.
If you’re considering a business continuity plan, you will be pleased to hear that we’re beginning to offer this as a service for our clients and network alike. Get in touch to find out more.