Business Continuity Planning
- the initial steps
Last month we started our series on the steps to enable you to produce a Business Continuity Plan, (click here if you missed it). This will help you to put in place the safeguards and contingencies needed to enable your business to continue trading in the event that your business is struck by a disaster.
There could be any number of potential threats to your business ranging from simple power outages to more serious incidents such as fire, flood, or the loss of a key member of staff.
This month we go into more detail about the first and second stages involved in producing a Business Continuity Plan:
1. Identifying your critical business processes
Critical business processes are those things that you do in your business that would cause you the most problems if you couldn't carry them out. If you have documented procedures or job specifications, these would be a good place to start.
Listing all of these processes can be quite daunting, so we recommend that you group the processes by department, functional area or even by the jobs that members of staff carry out.
- For example your accounts department (or the person who handles it for you) would need to be able to:
- Receive payments from customers and pay them into the bank;
- Pay supplier invoices on time;
- Pay staff on time;
- Keep records of all financial transactions;
- Make scheduled PAYE, Tax and VAT payments;
- etc.
- At the very least, your sales function needs to be able to:
- sell products or services to new and existing customers;
- respond to enquiries, provide quotes and product/service details to potential customers;
- take orders from customers.
- While your operations function needs to be able to deliver what has been ordered.
We recommend entering this information into an Excel spreadsheet; you might find it easier to use one sheet (or tab) in a workbook for each functional area.
You don't need to do this all at once. You can build up the spreadsheet area by area and add to it as you think of things. You can also ask you staff to review the processes and they will probably come with some others that you hadn't thought of.
2. Assessing the impact of not being able to carry these out
Now that you've got your processes listed start thinking about the consequences of not being able to carry them out. For example:
- not paying your staff could have serious consequences;
- not paying any money into your bank account could cause your business to go overdrawn or worse;
- not paying your suppliers could lead to the supply of critical materials being withheld;
- not paying HMRC could lead to a fine;
- not being able to deliver orders could lead to cancellations, lost customers and loss of future orders;
Some businesses may also have regulatory obligations that they need to comply with as conditions of their licence to operate. Failure to meet those obligations could mean the business becomes unable to trade.
As you consider these consequences add them to the spreadsheet against the processes they relate to.
Next add a column for the priority of each process and now consider the relative importance of each process in the light of the consequences of not being able to carry it out. Rather than trying to decide on the relative merits of each process, we would recommend assigning each process one of a fixed range of priorities, e.g.
- very high
- high
- medium
- low
- negligible
You now have a list of your processes, consequences and priorities and you are ready to go on to the next stage.
We will be tackling the remaining stages in future issues of this newsletter, i.e.:
- Listing the potential threats and risks to those processes
- Producing a matrix of processes, threats and impacts
- Developing a Disaster Recovery Plan
- Communicating the plans to all staff and identifying the key managers
but if you would like help or advice on this subject in the meantime, then please contact us
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Diskeeper
Best regards,