Developing an effective business continuity plan (BCP) requires understanding your organization’s critical processes, dependencies, and risks. If done well, though, the plan itself should dovetail into and inform the organization’s long-term strategy.
How exactly? We delve into the role of business continuity planning in long-term strategy in the following article.
Components of a business continuity plan
Indeed, business continuity planning entails detailed evaluation of daily operations, driven by stakeholders who have in-depth understanding of the company’s core products and/or services. From there, the Business Continuity team will define the organization’s recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO), before creating an effective business continuity strategy.
What are those?
Common business continuity terms, an organization’s RPO is the maximum amount of data loss deemed acceptable in the event of a disruption. Meanwhile, its RTO is the maximum duration allowed to restore operations after an outage. Taken together, these thresholds establish clear recovery goals, which help to guide the team in formulating effective recovery strategies that will be further articulated in the business continuity plan (BCP).
What should the BCP itself encompass? Business continuity planning should include the following components:
1. Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
The business impact analysis identifies and evaluates the impact that various disruptions could have on your core business functions. As an exercise, the BIA involves mapping dependencies, identifying available resources, and determining what the organization needs to recover and resume normal operations.
2. Risk Assessment (RA)
As the name implies, the risk assessment serves to identify and assess risks that could disrupt operations to proactively address these risks to reduce the likelihood of damaging incidents.
How business continuity planning supports long-term success
The BCP shouldn’t be a simple compliance measure, though. In fact, we’d go as far as to say a solid business continuity plan ought to play a critical role in shaping and supporting the organization’s long-term strategic objectives.
How, exactly? Well for one, creating a comprehensive business continuity plan inevitably brings attention to essential aspects of an organization’s core operations, infrastructure, risk factors, and interdependencies, careful consideration of which are critical to crafting a long-term strategic plan informed by achievable goals, viable actions, and measurable benchmarks.
Secondly, many of the same stakeholders participate in both business continuity and long-term strategic planning – at least they should. That overlap, when it happens, invariably helps streamline and enrich tasks like conducting the BIA, assessing risks, and determining the RPO and RTO, minimizing redundant work in the planning process.
Long-term strategic plan execution
Adverse events, which BCPs are meant to prevent, themselves present multifaceted threats to the organization’s ability to perform day-to-day operations. In turn, those threats, if realized, compromise the organization’s potential to achieve its long-term strategic goals.
Following this logic, a thoughtful business continuity strategy anticipates what’s required to efficiently identify and repair damage, resolve disruption, and get back to the business of delivering value.
The faster a well-executed business continuity plan enables the organization to solve these problems the more quickly the organization can resume its normal operations. That’s why following a disruption, your business continuity team should review and document the BCP’s effectiveness at resolving disruption and restoring operations.
From there, senior stakeholders may determine that outcomes once thought to be impossible within a given timeframe suddenly seem feasible. They may also assess that outcomes once seen as achievable now appear less so. In other words, post-disruption analysis stands out as a great opportunity to reevaluate the viability of your long-term strategic plan and make adjustments.
Of course, avoiding process redundancies in developing business continuity plans that contribute to long-term strategic plan success requires solutions like business continuity management software to digitize the development, execution, exercise, and review of business continuity plans as well as their track performance and drive wider improvements.
The best business continuity software available helps your organization develop, implement, and analyze the most effective business continuity strategy. What specific capabilities to consider, though? Check out our Buyer’s Guide to Business Continuity Software to find out.
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