Writing a business continuity plan

Prepare a business continuity plan to help your business cope in a crisis.

Business continuity doesn't have to be difficult or take a lot of time. These steps will help you prepare a plan for your business and give you confidence that you can cope in a crisis.

Get to grips with your business

What is the aim of your business and what are the key activities involved in achieving it?

What resources do the key activities need to be able to happen? Think about:

• staff
• premises
• equipment
• communication links
• IT
• suppliers
• specific knowledge or training

What deadlines do you work to?

Assess the risks

The aim of a business continuity plan is to help you cope with any disruption, regardless of the cause. For example, you may have a team of people who are key to your business. They could all become unavailable due to a flu pandemic, or their syndicate could win the lottery. You need to plan for their unavailability, whatever the reason.

What would the impact be if some or all of your key resources became unavailable?

Are there any situations which your business is particularly vulnerable to? Check the possible risks which may affect you.

What else could affect your business?

• staff lottery win
• fire
• break-in

Develop a strategy

Decide how you would handle a crisis by identifying:

• what actions you will take in a crisis
• how the actions will be done
• who will do those actions
• where the actions will take place, such as on-site or at an alternative location
• what the priorities will be

Write your plan

Using the information you have gathered, write your plan. It should be simple and flexible so it can handle any sort of disruption.

Test and maintain your plan

Test your plan to make sure that your assumptions work. Make sure your staff are familiar with it and have an idea of what would happen in a real incident.

There are various ways to test your plan. You could walk through aspects of the plan at a tabletop exercise, or carry out a full simulation. It can be less disruptive to test small parts of your plan at at time. This also allows you to focus on gaining as many valuable lessons learned as possible.

When you have tested your plan, you will have identified areas where you can improve things. Make changes to your plan to include these improvements and so it remains up to date.

Review your plan on a regular cycle. An out of date plan could be almost useless when you actually need to use it.