BP's consultants will help you to define which business units will be covered by the plan.
Why do you need a business continuity plan? What's the difference between continuity & resiliency? What fits you best?
BP's consultants will help you to define which business units will be covered by the plan, who will be involved in gathering information, & what approach we will take together to meet the Business Resiliency objective. This is where you assess your company risks, as well. You will be confident that your business can withstand any crisis.
The Business Impact Analysis discovers how you do what you do in light of continuing the enterprise. Business Unit surveys & interviews provide insight to the Mission Critical Functions that keep your company running.
All of your plans & exercises will be based on the information gathered in this step. This is where you find out what your people are doing instead of what their job description says. You can maximize efficiencies, productivity, & effectiveness with a BIA.
Based on the BIA, your consultant can create the draft BCP documentation in concert with the Business Continuity Administrator chosen in the Strategy Session. The unit recovery teams will review their Business Recovery Plans to make sure they make sense!
Completed BRPs, CMPs, ISCPs - all of these acronyms & plans are provided to flesh out your overall plan. Employee morale rises as they begin to realize that your company is prepared to make it through a crisis. You are ready for the demands of regulators, government agencies, insurance companies, and even your customers. You are prepared.
The BC program is not static. These are living documents that must be examined regularly and updated when needed.
Without testing, the BRPs will become worthless documentation. When a crisis occurs, the staff will have to make up contingencies on the fly. Tabletop Exercises serve as training sessions for everyone involved. The staff will begin to truly appreciate the BC Program & realize that resiliency is part of their every day work life. You will see faster results with less effort as the team begins to grow 'muscle memory'.
A Tabletop Exercise is the first step in continuing to manage & improve your BC program. Simulation Exercises are especially important in allowing the staff become familiar with daily resilience. This also gives Senior management the opportunity to review risks & determine if there are threats that were overlooked or overemphasized.
For some industries, the plan is not complete until it is fully tested. Simulation Exercises challenge the staff to take a hard look at the crisis management skills they have developed & to look at your daily processing one more time.
Now that your company has walked through the BCP, it's time to get ready for the next annual review! The consultant(s) is available to work with your BCP administrator to review the program's status, update data, & drive resiliency through the organization. The chokeholds in your company have been removed. This process has showed your staff how to break through problems & that can be used daily!
This is not a one time, 'put it on the shelf' process. If your company is audited or must show stakeholders that the health of the company's resiliency program is being taken seriously, regular reviews, testing, & training must occur to ensure that the staff is ready for any emergency. We are available to help you control your plan as an accountability partners & resiliency coaches.
There are a number of ways to ensure that your organization is ready for a disaster.