Having an effective BCP should result in avoiding the worst pain of disruptive incidents

How prepared is your organization to withstand serious disruptive incidents. Statistics show that 70% of companies that do not have an effective BCP are likely to go out of business following a serious disruptive incident. 

A serious incident can happen at any time and if you have not prepared an essential business continuity plan (BCP) then you probably have not assessed the risks your organization is facing either.

It is recognized that having an effective BCP is an important part of the organization's corporate governance and providing an adequate level of resources to meeting this objective is part and parcel of the Governing Board's key responsibilities.

Business impact analysis and assessment in your BCP

When analyzing your BCP for the purposes of improving continuity and resiliency, it is necessary to identify and assess the likely impact on the organization from potential disruptive events. Also known as a business impact analysis, this risk based process is often considered to be a rather daunting procedure as it often involves making a subjective assessment on disruptive events where the severity can range from minimal to catastrophic. This lack of clarity causes confusion and uncertainty and makes the process of defining specific outcomes difficult and can be subject to many disagreements about how an accurate result can be achieved. At long last help is now available that removes much of the complexity and establishes a workable and practical framework that is easy to understand and implement. The BC Expert BCP software outlined on this webpage provides a simple methodology for achieving this and it really works.

Starting process for developing and managing an effective BCP

Topics to be considered when starting to develop an essential BCP include: BCP policy; BCP management commitment; BCP documentation: and BCP objectives & targets. The BC Expert includes support for all these topics and the BCP management module is also used to record management decisions and evidence of management commitment towards the BCP preparation. Consideration is also given in this section to risk management concepts and the internal and external environment within which the organization operates.

BC Expert available in three fully scalable versions:

Silver:        Risk, BIA, business continuity BCP plan (more)

Gold:          Full functionality for BCP Plan best practise (more)

Platinum: Multi-enterprise BCP plan (more)

Mapping operational components in your BCP Plan

Carrying out your analysis of the business operations is simplified in the BC Expert.  To complete this aspect of the business continuity process, it is necessary to map all the operational components together. Potential incidents, critical assets and resources, key business processes and products and services should all be mapped together and dependencies established.  This is easy to accomplish in all three BC Expert versions.

Enter data into the BC Expert on your products and services and your key business processes in their respective modules and use the mapping arrows to map each related component together. Use the dependency functions to establish the dependency level for each component.

Undertake the same simple process with the assets and resources and also the potential incidents and the operational components are then effective linked together making planning and risk assessment significantly easier to accomplish. Identify single points of failure in the operational process and use this to establish priority setting.

View the related dependencies for each operational component to calculate RTOs, MTPDs and criticality levels.