5 Steps to Building a Business Continuity Plan

The first step to creating a business continuity plan is understanding what business processes you need to be worried about. Critical business processes are those that are necessary for the survival of the company due to—for example—loss of revenue, customer service interruption or brand damage (just to name a few). Ask yourself: What business processes are absolutely crucial to keeping your company running in order to avoid a severe negative impact?                                                                                

If you’re a manufacturing company, any business processes that make you unable to continue producing an important share of your product portfolio should be labeled as critical business processes. Identify what these are, and then describe the exact process, including the location where it occurs and who the parties involved are. For example: If you require a specific type of raw material to keep your production line going, detail the processes involved in making sure that material gets to your plant.

My pro tip for this step (and all of the steps): Make sure you're involving the relevant people in your business continuity planning. Business continuity is a joint effort, and must be understood by everyone who is part of maintaining it! 

Even critical business processes can sometimes be stopped for a few minutes without serious repercussions. So the next step in creating your business continuity plan is to understand the RTO (recovery time objective), which is the time period in which the critical business process must be restored before the impact of the interruption becomes intolerable. For each critical business process you outlined in step 1, define what the RTO for that process is.

Now that you have your critical business processes defined, know how quickly you need to restore them and know what resources are required to make them work, you have the information you need to get to the important part: Describing the strategy for restoring each process within the defined RTO. This strategy will be different for every process and every company—take the time to think it through and decide what the best approach would be. If, for example, the supplier for your raw material suddenly declares force majeure, do you have an alternative supplier in place that you can switch to? This is the kind of information that should be detailed in step 4 of your business continuity plans.

Steps 1-4 were the hard parts. By comparison, the last step is easy—just gather this information together in one place, so that you have a single repository where stakeholders in your company can view your critical business processes and the plans you have in place to restore them in the case of business interruption. The most rudimentary business continuity plans might just be stored in an Excel document—but there is also software available for making the process more seamless and automated. (Of course, it's essential to also inform and then train relevant people on these processes! When it comes to business continuity, capability is more important than detailed documentation.)

Once your business continuity plan is established, make sure that you also have a schedule in place to review it and update it accordingly!

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