Business Continuity

Hobart

I have been landed with the task of formulating a BCP for our business. I am looking for any references/links/examples to any sites which can kick me off and give me, for example, a TOC of what I should cover. Any help/advice appreciated.

Specky

Like many things, business continuity planning is often easier done by an outsider with a more objective viewpoint.

It can also be argued that an outsider with experience of BCP will be more likely to provide a more thorough plan including things the average meer mortal might miss.

Planning for continuity is a lot about common sense really. Hard though it may seem it begins with listing all the activities your company needs to undertake in order to carry out it's business and the resources required by the company for each activity.

Often people get too bogged down in the technical side here, simplistically business has to do with:

- plant (equipment required to do the jobs including desks to put the equipment on and chairs for folks to sit on)
- people (folks to sit at the desks)
- premises (places to put the desks and the people)
- utilities (power, water, heat, light, phone etc)
- inputs (raw materials in the case of manufacturing, data in the case of service)
- outputs (the product/service that is the object of the business)

Your business continuity plan must take into account all of these things but most importantly you need to put in place systems within your business that can be sustained through a disaster in order to recover from the loss of any or all of these fundamental business components.

The plan cannot be a document that is rolled out in the event of a problem with the hope that it'll patch up the holes. The plan and the systems upon which it must be built need to become an everyday part of your company's operations. Sure, most companys never experience a "game over" type disaster, but most companies that do will fail or experience serious losses.

Please PM me if you'd like to discuss this in more detail.

You could do worse than read "A Guide to Business Continuity Planning" by J. Barnes (Wiley).

Have a search around on the net for risk management and business continuity you should find a few useful pointers.

Rorshach

There are some very good sites for you to try. This is the best one if you're serious about BC:

http://www.thebci.org
Download their best practices and guidelines. This is the methodology used by most businesses.

Also try:

http://www.survive.com

There should be some good stuff there. In terms of books the sites above should have some but also:

http://www.disasterecoverybooks.com
http://www.business-minds.com/detail.asp?item=100000000031947

I really recommend the Financial Time Press book on BCM by Michael Gallagher. It provides a very good introduction to the area of BCM in a down to earth Irish kind of way.

Specky has a point about the enrollment of external resources to assist in BCM. I'd recommend you drive the overall programme yourself (assuming you are comfortable with that) and then bring in some experts for different sections e.g. BIA/RAs, documenting the plan and running exercises. Two companies I can recommned are:

Risk Management International
Renaissance

Hope this helps.