Business Continuity Plan – An overview

Finance, Financial Planning And Analysis , Small Business, Startups

The unanticipated Corona outbreak has left the global economy and businesses in a state of anarchy. While businesses are still trying to figure out the best way to survive during these tough times, a Business Continuity plan can be their best bet to pull them out of this crisis. 

So let’s discuss in details what is a BCP and how it can be of help:

What Is Business Continuity Planning (BCP)? 

A Business Continuity Plan(BCP) is designed to pull out companies from potential threats and risks. It ensures that assets and personnel are kept protected so that they are able to function efficiently during tough times and make sure business operations aren’t hampered.

BCP assesses each and every risk that can cause a failure to the businesses operations process and plans out risk management accordingly. Risks can be either natural disasters like fire, flood etc or can be man made like cyber attacks. While every company and industry has a different set of driving factors and therefore BCP differ accordingly, a general business continuity plan includes the following:

• Determine how exactly these risks will affect the normal functioning(or operations) of the company
• Mitigate the risks by enforcing safeguards and procedures to mitigate the risks
• Testing procedures to ensure they work
• Reviewing the process to avoid any delays
• Policy, purpose, and scope
• Goals and objectives
• Key roles and responsibilities
• Risk mitigation plans
• List of tasks required to keep operations flowing
• Explanation of where to go during an emergency
• Information on data backups and site backup
• Plan maintenance protocols
• Coordination with local emergency personnel
• Contact information of management personnel

You May Also Read – 5 Common Property Accounting Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

5 Steps for Developing a Business Continuity Plan

As businesses have been suffering the mayhem caused by the COVID-19, they are striving hard to get back on track. However, one can use a Business Continuity Plan to come out of this trouble. Here’s how you can develop a solid BCP. 

• Business Impact Analysis:

Start with analyzing the impacts of the risk on your business and use the information to figure out the processes that are having the most impact on the business’ financial and operational functions. Once you have identified the pain points, move onto the next step which is recovery.

• Explore Recovery plans:

Now since you know about the pain points, in this step, you must identify and explore what steps need to be taken in order to recover critical business operations and make them functional. 

• Form a team:

While you have devised a recovery plan, it is the continuity of the process that will define how well you recover from the losses done and for how long your operations will continue to be functional. Therefore, it is necessary to form(organize) a continuity team to monitor the recovery process.

• Testing

Till the time you aren’t testing, you won’t know what’s working best for your business. It’s wise to test various business continuity plans in order to make sure which is the most effective.

• Training: 

To ensure that the continuity team formed above to monitor that the recovery plan is performing its task with efficiency, training of the team is very vital. Training is what is very essential for skill development as well as to keep up with the ongoing trends which is the need of the hour

Summing Up:

Tough times require both courage and extraordinary measures. While the economy is suffering a downturn and businesses are taking tough steps like downsizing to cope up with the corona outbreak, a Business Continuity Plan can significantly help businesses find better ways to get back on track.