Tag: business continuity consulting

5 Easy Steps to Create an Effective Business Continuity Plan

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.

How Can a Business Continuity Management System Help During the Coronavirus Pandemic?

As global concerns arise just because of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic outbreak, businesses are facing rapid response challenges, from employee health and welfare to disrupted supply chains. Assured GRC advises steps to prepare and execute a rigid business continuity plan. By investing in the development, implementation, and maintenance of a viable BCM programme. Organisations can provide the most effective approach to restoring and restarting critical and important functions and processes. And most importantly, it provides a layer of protection for their most important assets, information, cash flow, and reputation.

Before knowing about how a business continuity management system can help your organisation during COVID-19, you need to know about this system.

What Exactly Is The Business Continuity Management System?

A business continuity management system in the UK is a framework for identifying an organisation’s risk of exposure to internal and external threats. The purpose of this system is to offer the business the ability to effectively respond to threats such as natural disasters or data breaches and protect the business interests of the organisation. This system includes disaster recovery, crisis management, incident management, emergency management, and contingency planning.

According to ISO 22301, a BCMS emphasises the importance of:

  • • Understanding continuity and awareness needs, as well as the necessity for establishing BCM policy and objectives
  • • Implementing and operating controls and measures for managing the overall continuity risks of an organisation
  • • Monitoring the performance and effectiveness of the business continuity management system in UK

How Can BCMS Save Your Business During A Coronavirus Pandemic?

The business continuity management system can be an essential tool for ensuring a business’s service line is sealed during the incident that causes business disruption like the coronavirus pandemic. Businesses with such plans are actively consulting and using their plans as they work through the current national emergency. And they would suggest that the plans be adjusted on a real-time basis as management pivots to resolve situations that arise.

Let’s take a look at five steps plan for business continuity management system:

Conduct a Business Impact Analysis (BIA)

A BIA can help your business identify and estimate the potential effects of the coronavirus on business operations. This process includes performing a gap analysis to consider your organisation’s willingness for continued operations. When conducting this analysis, consider the impact on stakeholder groups including employees, customers or suppliers.

Build Scenarios

Be ready for “worst” and “most-likely” case scenarios. This provides a proper range of results for the business to consider. The CGMA scenario planning tool is a great resource to guide you through this process. Don’t forget to look at the upside risks. You also hire a reliable business continuity consultancy service in the UK.

Perform Risk Analysis and Mapping

In this step, you should consider scenarios to help you identify new risks. This will help you build robust scenarios. Consider also other potential risks including financial, operational and external and even the probability of occurrence. You can get in touch with a consultant for a business continuity consulting service.

Ensure Organisational Alignment and Communication

Create a cross-functional pandemic response team to ensure organisational alignment around key objectives. Make sure approvals are in place to execute the continuity plan that confirms with governance requirements. Community with stakeholders is also an important step for every business continuity management system in the UK. Identify the content and frequency with which you want to communicate with your stakeholder groups. It’s extremely useful to create specific landing pages for employees, customers, and investors with resources and guidance.

Develop an Action Plan with Continuous Monitoring

An effective business continuity plan also focuses on key performance indicators of priority processes. Increase the frequency of determining and monitoring liquidity, sales, and stock to daily or weekly. Influence data feeds for increased responses to change risks. Try to enable continuous prediction in key functions and keep adjusting. You can also hire professionals for business continuity consulting services. Once you have followed these five easy steps of the business continuity management system in the UK, you will protect your business or employees during this coronavirus pandemic. Make sure you contact an expert consultant for marinating your BCMS.

Assured GRC Is Here For Your Help!

If you are looking for a professional consultant for business continuity consulting services in the UK, contact Assured GRC today! We know your organisations, businesses, and communities depend on your guidance during these challenging times. Our information security policy gives further guidance on risk management and information assurance. At Assured GRC, we have implemented ISO 22301 to manage its business continuity operations and this is managed by our IMS. If you have any questions or need anything about the business continuity consulting service, don’t hesitate to contact us at +44 (0)203 4759 932 or management@assuredgrc.com today.