Five Tips for Good Business Continuity

In today's unpredictable business environment, ensuring the continuity of operations is crucial. Business Continuity Management (BCM) is a strategic approach that helps organisations prepare for, respond to, and recover from, disruptive incidents.

To be effective, BCM should go beyond a list of emergency contacts, or just arranging for people to work from home. ISO 22301 provides a great risk-based framework. It can help you identify the priorities in your business, test recovery tools and think about elements that a standard disaster recovery plan will not consider.

You don’t need to achieve ISO certification to implement effective business continuity practices. Here are five tips to help you establish robust business continuity:

1. Understand the basics of business continuity

This is more than a list of emergency contacts and a large plan covering dozens of different potential events. We can help you to develop a tailored, dynamic, easy to use toolkit that looks at risk, critical functions and straightforward steps to recovery.

2. Conduct a Business Impact Assessment (BIA)

Most BCMs ignore this critical step. A BIA helps identify and prioritise the functions, key time frames and recovery objectives that are essential to your organisation's survival. An effective BIA ensures that resources are prioritised effectively, giving your organisation the best chance of reducing the impacts of an unplanned event.

3. Run crisis scenarios

Testing your resilience through crisis scenarios is vital, and enables lessons to be learnt and improvements made to your response plan. From simple desktop exercises with management, through to more elaborate scenarios to see how your colleagues respond to developing situations, a bespoke exercise, or a testing programme, will ensure your organisation remains responsive and better able to cope with a variety of situations that otherwise derail your activities.

4. Develop clear communication strategies

Clear communication plans for both internal and external stakeholders help maintain transparency and trust, whilst ensuring consistent messaging, and clarity in roles and responsibilities during a disruption.

5. Regularly review and update your plan

Effective BCM is not just a case of writing a plan and it's all done. Periodic review and improvement to your continuity processes ensure it remains robust. Internal and external risks evolve, so your planning should reflect this accordingly. If you choose to work with us, we can provide short simple updates along with periodic testing to help keep it all relevant.

Our consultants are here to support you every step of the way, helping you put resilient and effective business continuity management into place.

Get in touch with us to discuss your business continuity plans,
we’ll be delighted to help you ensure they’re resilient and effective.