Businesses around the world are dealing with growing challenges due to the coronavirus crisis, which has impacted nearly every facet of business. To give your organisation the best shot at success during this disaster, organisations like yours need to create an effective business continuity plan.
What Exactly is the Business Continuity Plan (BCP)?
A business continuity plan (BCP) is a process that highlights the potential impact of disaster situations, creates policies to respond to them, and helps businesses recover quickly so they can function as usual. A BCP is usually built in advance of a disaster and includes the company’s key stakeholders. Protecting personnel and assets both during and after an emergency is the main aim of
business continuity planning services in the UK.
COVID-19 crisis is leading to a loss in revenue and higher costs which in turn is affecting profitability. If you have an effective or protective BCP plan, you can get the best shot at success during and after this unanticipated disaster. This plan can also benefit your business in three ways including:
- • Your business will feel more prepared to handle the unpredicted disaster
- • Your business will continue providing acceptable service during and after the crisis
- • Your service will better preserve its corporate reputation, image and revenue stream
How to Create an Effective and Protective BCP for Your Organisation?
Don’t wait until the coronavirus crisis ruins your business or reputation. If your organisation doesn’t yet have an effective business continuity plan, now is the time to create one. Here are five smart tips involved in creating an effective BCP for your organisation.
Step 1: Establish an Emergency Preparedness Team
The important part of your BCP is creating an emergency preparedness team that implements and executes the business continuity plan. Your team’s structure relies on the size of your company and how you plan to roll out your programme. As a small business owner, you should include a manager, assistant manager, and administrative assistant from each department for your business continuity team. These individuals will prepare standards for the plan, tradition other team members, and identify processes to make the project flow smoother.
For a medium or large organisation, you need to include additional personnel on the team and disperse responsibilities accordingly. Apart from this, you can hire business continuity consulting services for creating an effective plan without any hassle.
Step 2: Conduct a Business Impact Analysis.
Understanding the operational, financial, and physical risks your company is facing during disruption is the second step of business continuity planning. You can determine these types of risks via a business impact analysis or hire a reliable business continuity planning service in the UK.
An impact analysis will help your organisation identify specific risks and threats to operations, financial performance, reputation, employees, and supply chains. It is a great starting point for risk identification and assessment. Once you have created a list of potential risks to your organisation, discuss how these risks could affect operations. Once you have got the completed questionnaire responses, review them, and conduct follow-up interviews to validate information and fill any knowledge gaps.
Step 3 – Identify Resources Needed With a Gap Analysis.
Your business continuity team has conducted an impact analysis which identified and documented potential risks to your organisation in the crisis’s wake. Your analysis may have revealed discrepancies between the resources you have and the resources you still need. This is where your team will want to conduct a “gap analysis”. After your analysis is concluded, you’ll be ready to explore and implement recovery strategies. Besides, you can hire business continuity consulting services for your business.
Step 4 – Explore and Implement Recovery Strategies.
While having knowledge about the risk of your organisation is important, knowing how to react and recover is essential to get success after an unpredicted event is also important for creating a business continuity plan. Once your business is impacted and financial losses begin to grow, it can be complicated to recover without a plan. To represent, discuss the following question samples with your team:
- • If our facility or its equipment becomes damaged, how will we continue to meet the demand for products or services?
- • If our facilities are impacted by a natural disaster, will employees work from home or at an alternate location?
- • Concerns such as these will be addressed in your business continuity plan. For every disaster assembled in your business impact analysis, discuss any questions and concerns you may have regarding the circumstance.
Step 5 – Test Results
Since an organisation’s risks and requirements are never set in stone, a business continuity plan is never truly finished.quietly changes and adapts as the business grows. So, test your BCP and make sure it is effective, observe results and make recommendations for improvement. Also, you can hire business continuity consulting services in the UK for getting an effective plan at the end.
Once you have followed these five steps, you will create an effective business continuity plan to protect your business from COVID-19 disaster. Apart from this, you can get in touch with
Assured GRC for reliable business continuity planning services in the UK.
Contact us at
+44 (0)203 4759 932 or
management@assuredgrc.com for hiring business continuity consulting services in the UK for your organisation.
