A calamity is unforeseeable but probable. The success of every business depends on its ability to adapt to situations and this cannot be more true with the recent coronavirus outbreak. Thus, there is a great emphasis on creating a business continuity plan to ensure that the business is still running, even if it’s not at its optimal level.
A business continuity plan is a system of prevention and recovery handles the potential threats to a business. It also helps to maintain business operations before and during the execution of disaster recovery. This often includes slight tweaks to the business operations, without having to permanently adapt, and finding a working method that best suits the current environmental conditions. Not only does having an effective plan help you retain current customers, and hopefully increase your consumer base whilst you’re at it, but there’s no better time for your company to evolve!
If you’re having problems trying to figure out how to draft out a successful business continuity plan, here’s a rough guideline you may want to use as a reference.
1. Identify The Scope Of The Plan
Every plan always starts with an objective in mind and thus, you will need to set the goals that you wish to attain. It may be retaining a certain percentage of your consumer base, or even expanding your brand presence. It can also be wanting to reach a particular profit margin or even effectively reducing the costs. These are all primary business goals, at any given time, but now, you will have to reach these goals with the environmental changes in mind. Worst scenario, you will have to downsize your company and search for a smaller office space for rent.
One significant component in planning is the budget, including the research hours, training time and materials. So be sure to consider these when figuring out the small goals and overall objective.
2. Conduct A Business Impact Analysis
An effective business continuity plan is without a business impact analysis. What the latter does is to assess the impact of these potential threats could have on every aspect of your business. Of course, this comes in with predictions and assumptions, but putting together viable and probable scenarios will allow you to put together templates.
Every business impact analysis should include explanations of the core business operations and which areas are crucial to ensure the business’s continual operations. It also needs a detailed report on the resources required to ensure the company stays afloat.
On that note, you will have to try and test it to discover potential holes and you can thus come out with solutions to counter those problems. The effectiveness of your business continuity plan will then increase.
3. Identify Critical Functions
Next, you will have to identify the critical business aspects that will receive the most damage from the changes, including revenue loss, damage to the brand presence or the operation itself. You will then have to classify it according to importance by the potential severity and its possible spread to other aspects from high, medium to low.
4. Finally, It’s Time To Create A Plan
Ultimately, there are 3 aspects you will have to tackle: its prevention, response and recovery strategies. Now that you have your business impact analysis, you can figure out what your current recovery capabilities and its improvements. A plan should be done up for each stage: a plan to mitigate the damage, a detailed emergency plan for every department and finally, a recovery plan. Another aspect you need to keep in mind is any time-sensitive stipulations.
Conclusion
Of course, this is simple in theory. The challenge comes in its execution and implementation. Thus, to ensure a high success rate, you will need to conduct tests within your office space, especially before your business hits an environment change. After all, the best way to tackle such changes is to foremost, be ready.
Our offices are designed to give you maximum comfort and tranquillity. With a boost to your productivity and efficiency, you’d be able to establish a stable foundation that is guaranteed to help in any crisis.