Business continuity

Any incident whether it is large or small, accident or deliberate, can cause major disruption to your business. However, by planning in advance you will be able to resume your day to day business sooner.

This is where Business Continuity Planning (BCP) comes in. Its purpose is to help you to prepare strategies to cope with disruptions so that you can continue to deliver your business critical activities and reduce potential harm to staff.

By understanding the risks facing the everyday running of your business or organisation, you are better able to foresee problems and guard against them developing into serious disruptions.

Why have a Business Continuity Plan?

What do you do, for example, if your workplace catches fire?

Some hard decisions will have to be made, and made quickly. For instance:

what do you do with all your staff?
how do you tell the community/customer that you cannot provide 'business/service as usual'?
how do you meet important deadlines?

The list of questions grows, and so do the levels of uncertainty and anxiety. Without a Business Continuity Plan you will have to rely on an ad-hoc approach to deal with these.