We frequently hear the term ‘BCP’ being used by clients as shorthand for an array of business continuity related activities. Most often this is used in the context of a disruption and the need to move from a business-as-usual response to an incident management structure for the immediate response and recovery of disrupted activities: i.e “we are in BCP mode…”
From our experience it is worth examining what ‘BCP’ can mean so we can be clearer about what is to be achieved.
A Business Continuity Plan [BCP] should be the reference document that guides a response team during an incident or crisis. This should provide a handrail to bring the right people together and to act as a framework and aide memoire to promote adaptive problem solving.
A Business Continuity Plan should be the product of the act of Business Continuity Planning [BCP]. This should comprise analysis from Business Impact Analyses (BIAs) and a Business Continuity Risk Assessment and result in a list of prioritized critical activities, workarounds, key dependencies and further possible mitigations, in the form of strategies and solutions, to reduce the likelihood of a risk occurring or if it does, to reduce the impact and / or duration.
Business Continuity Planning should be a periodic activity and should be governed by a framework and methodology that describes how this should be implemented to achieve the organisation’s objectives, who is responsible and how frequently these activities should be conducted. Most usually this is achieved through a Business Continuity [Management] Programme [BCP].
Organisations that implement each of these business continuity activities display the type of maturity of preparation and that promotes successful maintenance of critical business outputs during a disruption and enables the rapid recovery of any disrupted critical activities.
A lack of clarity in terminology often results in confused and lengthy documentation that is seldom referred to and simply becomes a bureaucratic chore to maintain.
First published on LinkedIn: Originally published on LinkedIn