Why develop a Business Continuity Program?

A Business Continuity Program is the complete action plan to help prevent disasters and set up a plan to recover from an unexpected event that interrupts your business. A large percentage of businesses do not survive a disaster and end up out of business. Stay in business for the long term – be ready for disaster and unexpected events with a complete Business Continuity Plan.

A Business Continuity Program is sometimes viewed as an expensive program for many companies. You hear comments like:

“We don’t need it; we have never had a problem.”
“We have insurance.”
“Our people are really good. If something happens they will get us back operational in no time”

Believing these statements could prevent your company from surviving an emergency or disaster event.

If your company has never experienced a problem, consider yourself very lucky. Remember a problem does not have to happen at your facility. What happens if your major supplier or customer has a problem? What if another company in your building or campus has a problem? Any of these problems could impact your business.

You have insurance, but many sources of disasters are not covered by business insurance. Business interruption insurance covers the lost profits, buildings and operational costs. But if you have no business to operate, or no building to work out of, then insurance will not really help.

Sure your people are good, but even the best people will have trouble recovering your business if they do not know where they are going to recover the business and what they need to recover. You could buy everything after a disaster and locate a new building and build out the infrastructure and contact your clients and suppliers, etc. You also have to consider that your best people may not be available to recover your business. They may be hurt, on vacation, stressed due to the disaster or they may have died in the disaster.

By developing a Business Continuity Program for your company and making business continuity part of your corporate culture, you will be well on your way to becoming a company that will be able to survive an emergency or disaster event.

Excerpted from “Business Continuity Program Development – A Basic Guide” developed by Business Continuity & Recovery Consulting

Business Continuity Planning in this Economic Cycle

Is business continuity planning something that you need to do during an economic downturn? Or is this a "nice to have" that can be put on the back-burner and looked at when the economy picks-up?

I am going to argue that now is the time you should be developing and implementing a full business continuity plan.

Many companies cut back on their marketing and spending during tough economic times. The same is true for those projects that they know they need to complete but they have always had other projects with a higher priority to take care of first. Business Continuity Planning is one of those projects. As many marketing people will tell you, during tough economic times, you should increase your marketing, not cut back. People still need to know you are in business. Companies still need to buy your services; they need to find you.

So why should you consider developing a Business Continuity Plan now?

I suggest you take a look at your supply chain. Do you have one or two main suppliers of your raw material? Do you have one or two customers that provide over 50% of your revenues? What would happen if any one of these companies went out of business? Could your business survive?

A Business Continuity Plan is not a program that can or should be deferred until the "time is right". The only right time is now to begin developing and implementing a plan.

Disasters happen at the worse possible time. They do not wait until you or your executives say that they can respond to the emergency or disaster event.

My advice is to start your planning now. When everyone else is experiencing problems, you will be able to know that you have thought through your business' primary activities and will know how to respond effectively and efficiently to any emergency event.

Testing Business Continuity Plans – do you do enough?

Many more companies have come to realize that the development an implementation of a Business Continuity Program is now a good business practice. The existence of this program gives the executives, the staff, the Board of Directors and shareholders a feeling of confidence in the effective and quick recovery of the business operations in the event of a disaster.

Every year the plan gets that Auditor’s tick mark and people point to the report and say that they are covered should a disaster occur. And every year the plan gets put back into the binder and put back on the shelf only to be dusted off next year.

So could you really recover using your plan documentation?

Do you know what is in your plan? Has your plan been updated with all of the technology and business changes that have occurred this year? Has it been tested?

An untested plan is not any better than not having a plan. If the plan has not been kept up-to-date then it is best left in the binder during a disaster because it will only hinder your recovery not help it take place.

Testing can be passive for business plans and crisis management plans and active for technology recovery plans. You need to implement a comprehensive testing program for all of your company’s recovery plans.

Each test should have objectives and the results should be documented and any discrepancies between expectations and actual results addressed.

No finger pointing is allowed. Take an objective look at why the plan did not work as expected. Was a critical update missed? Were the objectives set too high for the level of experience of your test team and testing program? There is no sense in trying to recover your complete company during the first or second exercise. You need to take small gradual steps to develop your team’s confidence in their capability to properly execute the instructions in the plan. Too fast and they will become disheartened, to slow and they will become bored.

Once you have implemented your testing program and your team has gained confidence in their capability then you can start to set harder to reach goals.

Along with the testing program, you also need to implement a proper maintenance program for the plan documents.

Once you have put these programs in place only then can you and those people who rely on your company be sure that the company could be recovered quickly and fully after a disaster event.