Develop a Business Continuity Plan

Streamline the traditional approach to make BCP development manageable and repeatable.

Analyst Perspective

A BCP touches every aspect of your organization, making it potentially the most complex project you’ll take on. Streamline this effort or you won’t get far.

None of us needs to look very far to find a reason to have an effective business continuity plan.

From pandemics to natural disasters to supply chain disruptions to IT outages, there’s no shortage of events that can disrupt your complex and interconnected business processes. How in the world can anyone build a plan to address all these threats?

Don’t try to boil the ocean. Use these tactics to streamline your BCP project and stay on track:

• Focus on one business unit at a time. Keep the effort manageable, establish a repeatable process, and produce deliverables that provide a starting point for the rest of the organization.
• Don’t start with an extensive risk analysis. It takes too long and at the end you’ll still need a plan to resume business operations following a disruption. Rather than trying to predict what could cause a disruption, focus on how to recover.
• Keep your BCP documentation concise. Use flowcharts, checklists, and diagrams instead of traditional manuals.

No one can predict every possible disruption, but by following the guidance in this blueprint, you can build a flexible continuity plan that allows you to withstand the threats your organization may face.

Frank Trovato

Research Director,
IT Infrastructure & Operations Practice
Info-Tech Research Group

Andrew Sharp

Senior Research Analyst,
IT Infrastructure & Operations Practice
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

• Recent crises have increased executive awareness and internal pressure to create a BCP.
• Industry- and government-driven regulations require evidence of sound business continuity practices.
• Customers demand their vendors provide evidence of a workable BCP prior to signing a contract.

IT leaders, because of their cross-functional view and experience with incident management and DR, are often asked to lead BCP efforts.

Common Obstacles

• IT managers asked to lead BCP efforts are dealing with processes and requirements beyond IT and outside of their control.
• BCP requires input from multiple departments with different and sometimes conflicting objectives.
• Typically there are few, if any, dedicated resources for BCP, so it can't be a full-time, resource-intensive project.

Info-Tech’s Approach

• Focus on implementing a structured and repeatable process that can be applied to one business unit at a time to avoid BCP from becoming an overwhelming project.
• Enable business leaders to own the BCP going forward by establishing a template that the rest of the organization can follow.
• Leverage BCP outcomes to refine IT DRP recovery objectives and achieve DRP-BCP alignment.

Info-Tech Insight

As an IT leader you have the skill set and organizational knowledge to lead a BCP project, but you must enable business leaders to own their department’s BCP practices and outputs. They know their processes and, therefore, their requirements to resume business operations better than anyone else.

Use this research to create business unit BCPs and structure your overall BCP

A business continuity plan (BCP) consists of separate but related sub-plans, as illustrated below. This blueprint enables you to:

• Develop a BCP for a selected business unit (as a pilot project), and thereby establish a methodology that can be repeated for remaining business units.
• Through the BCP process, clarify requirements for an IT disaster recovery plan (DRP). Refer to Info-Tech’s Disaster Recovery Planning workshop for instructions on how to create an IT DRP.
• Implement ongoing business continuity management to govern BCP, DRP, and crisis management.

Overall Business Continuity Plan

IT Disaster Recovery Plan

A plan to restore IT application and infrastructure services following a disruption.

Info-Tech’s disaster recovery planning blueprint provides a methodology for creating the IT DRP. Leverage this blueprint to validate and provide inputs for your IT DRP.

BCP for Each Business Unit

A set of plans to resume business processes for each business unit. This includes:

• Identifying business processes and dependencies.
• Defining an acceptable recovery timeline based on a business impact analysis.
• Creating a step-by-step recovery workflow.

Crisis Management Plan

A plan to manage a wide range of crises, from health and safety incidents to business disruptions to reputational damage.

Info-Tech’s Implement Crisis Management Best Practices blueprint provides a framework for planning a response to any crisis, from health and safety incidents to reputational damage.

IT leaders asked to develop a BCP should start with an IT Disaster Recovery Plan

It’s a business continuity plan. Why should you start continuity planning with IT?

1. IT services are a critical dependency for most business processes. Creating an IT DRP helps you mitigate a key risk to continuity quicker than it takes to complete your overall BCP, and you can then focus on other dependencies such as people, facilities, and suppliers.
2. A BCP requires workarounds for IT failures. But it’s difficult to plan workarounds without a clear understanding of the potential IT downtime and data loss. Your DRP will answer those questions, and without a DRP, BCP discussions can get bogged down in IT discussions. Think of payroll as an example: if downtime might be 24 hours, the business might simply wait for recovery; if downtime might be a week, waiting it out is not an option.
3. As an IT manager, you can develop an IT DRP primarily with resources within your control. That makes it an easier starting point and puts IT in a better position to shift responsibility for BCP to business leaders (where it should reside) since essentially the IT portion is done.

Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan today.

Modernize the BCP

If your BCP relies heavily on paper-based processes as workarounds, it’s time to update your plan.

Back when transactions were recorded on paper and then keyed into the mainframe system later, it was easier to revert to deskside processes. There is very little in the way of paper-based processes anymore, and as a result, it is increasingly difficult to resume business processes without IT.

Think about your own organization. What IT system(s) are absolutely critical to business operations? While you might be able to continue doing business without IT, this requires regular preparation and training. It’s likely a completely offline process and won’t be a viable workaround for long even if staff know how to do the work. If your data center and core systems are down, technology-enabled workarounds (such as collaboration via mobile technologies or cloud-based solutions) could help you weather the outage, and may be more flexible and adaptable for day-to-day work.

The bottom line:

Technology is a critical dependency for business processes. Consider the role IT systems play as process dependencies and as workarounds as part of continuity planning.

Info-Tech’s approach

The traditional approach to BCP takes too long and produces a plan that is difficult to use and maintain.

The Problem: You need to create a BCP, but don’t know where to start.

• BCP is being demanded more and more to comply with regulations, mitigate business risk, meet customer demands, and obtain insurance.
• IT leaders are often asked to lead BCP.

The Complication: A traditional BCP process takes longer to show value.

• Traditional consultants don’t usually have an incentive to accelerate the process.
• At the same time, self-directed projects with no defined process go months without producing useful deliverables.
• The result is a dense manual that checks boxes but isn’t maintainable or usable in a crisis.

The Info-Tech difference:

Use Info-Tech’s methodology to right-size and streamline the process.

• Reduce required effort. Keep the work manageable and maintain momentum by focusing on one business unit at a time; allow that unit to own their BCP.
• Prioritize your effort. Evaluate the current state of your BCP to identify the steps that are most in need of attention.
• Get valuable results faster. Functional deliverables and insights from the first business unit’s BCP can be leveraged by the entire organization (e.g. communication, assessment, and BC site strategies).

Expedite BCP development

Info-Tech’s Approach to BCP:

• Start with one critical business unit to manage scope, establish a repeatable process, and generate deliverables that become a template for remaining business units.
• Resolve critical gaps as you identify them, generating early value and risk mitigation.
• Create concise, practical documentation to support recovery.

Embed training and awareness throughout the planning process.

BCP for Business Unit A:

Scope → Pilot BIA → Response Plan → Gap Analysis

→ Lessons Learned:

• Leverage early results to establish a BCM framework.
• Take action to resolve critical gaps as they are identified.
• BCP for Business Units B through N.
• Scope→BIA→Response Plan→Gap Analysis

= Ongoing governance, testing, maintenance, improvement, awareness, and training.

By comparison, a traditional BCP approach takes much longer to mitigate risk:

• An extensive, upfront commitment of time and resources before defining incident response plans and mitigating risk.
• A “big bang” approach that makes it difficult to predict the required resourcing and timelines for the project.

Organizational Risk Assessment and Business Impact Analysis → Solution Design to Achieve Recovery Objectives → Create and Validate Response Plans

Case Study

Continuity Planning Supports COVID-19 Response

Industry: Non-Profit
Source: Info-Tech Advisory Services

A charitable foundation for a major state university engaged Info-Tech to support the creation of their business continuity plan.

With support from Info-Tech analysts and the tools in this blueprint, they worked with their business unit stakeholders to identify recovery objectives, confirm recovery capabilities and business process workarounds, and address gaps in their continuity plans.

Results

The outcome wasn’t a pandemic plan – it was a continuity plan that was applicable to pandemics. And it worked. Business processes were prioritized, gaps in work-from-home and business process workarounds had been identified and addressed, business leaders owned their plan and understood their role in it, and IT had clear requirements that they were able and ready to support.

“The work you did here with us was beyond valuable! I wish I could actually explain how ready we really were for this…while not necessarily for a pandemic, we were ready to spring into action, set things up, the priorities were established, and most importantly some of the changes we’ve made over the past few years helped beyond words! The fact that the groups had talked about this previously almost made what we had to do easy.“ -- VP IT Infrastructure

Download the BCP Case Study

Project Overview: BCP

Blueprint deliverables

Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

BCP Business Impact Analysis Tool: Conduct and document a business impact analysis using this document.

BCP Recovery Workflows Example: Model your own recovery workflows on this example.

BCP Project Roadmap: Use this tool to prioritize projects that can improve BCP capabilities and mitigate gaps and risks.

BCP Relocation Checklists: Plan for and manage a site relocation – whether to an alternate site or work from home.

Key deliverable:

BCP Summary Document

Summarize your organization's continuity capabilities and objectives in a 15-page, easy-to-consume template.

This document consolidates data from the supporting documentation and tools to the right.

Download Info-Tech’s BCP Summary Document

Insight summary

Focus less on risk, and more on recovery

Avoid focusing on risk and probability analysis to drive your continuity strategy. You never know what might disrupt your business, so develop a flexible plan to enable business resumption regardless of the event.

Small teams = good pilots

Choose a small team for your BCP pilot. Small teams are better at trialing new techniques and finding new ways to think about problems.

Calculate downtime impact

Develop and apply a scoring scale to develop a more-objective assessment of downtime impact for the organization. This will help you prioritize recovery.

It’s not no, but rather not now…

You can’t address all the organization’s continuity challenges at once. Prioritize high value, low effort initiatives and create a long-term roadmap for the rest.

Show Value Now

Get to value quickly. Start with one business unit with continuity challenges, and a small, focused project team who can rapidly learn the methodology, identify continuity gaps, and define solutions that can also be leveraged by other departments right away.

Lightweight Testing Exercises

Outline recovery capabilities using lightweight, low risk tabletop planning exercises. Our research shows tabletop exercises increase confidence in recovery capabilities almost as much as live exercises, which carry much higher costs and risks.

Blueprint benefits

Demonstrate compliance with demands from regulators and customers

• Develop a plan that satisfies auditors, customers, and insurance providers who demand proof of a continuity plan.
• Demonstrate commitment to resilience by identifying gaps in current capabilities and projects to overcome those gaps.
• Empower business users to develop their plans and perform regular maintenance to ensure plans don’t go stale.
• Establish a culture of business readiness and resilience.

Leverage your BCP to drive value (Business Benefits)

• Enable flexible, mobile, and adaptable business operations that can overcome disruptions large and small. This includes making it easier to work remotely in response to pandemics or facility disruptions.
• Clarify the risk of the status quo to business leaders so they can make informed decisions on where to invest in business continuity.
• Demonstrate to customers your ability to overcome disruptions and continue to deliver your services.

Info-Tech Advisory Services lead to Measurable Value

Info-Tech members told us they save an average of $44,522 and 23 days by working with an Info-Tech analyst on BCP (source: client response data from Info-Tech's Measured Value Survey).

Why do members report value from analyst engagement?

1. Expert advice on your specific situation to overcome obstacles and speed bumps.
2. Structure the project and stay on track.
3. Review project deliverables and ensure the process is applied properly.

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

"Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."

Guided Implementation

“Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

Workshop

“We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

Consulting

“Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

Diagnostic and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

Guided Implementation

Your Trusted Advisor is a call away.

A Guided Implementation (GI) is series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is between eight to twelve calls over the course of four to six months.

Scoping

Call 1: Scope requirements, objectives, and stakeholders. Identify a pilot BCP project.

Business Processes and Dependencies

Calls 2 - 4: Assess current BCP maturity. Create business process workflows, dependencies, alternates, and workarounds.

Conduct a BIA

Calls 5 – 7: Create an impact scoring scale and conduct a BIA. Identify acceptable RTO and RPO.

Recovery Workflow

Calls 8 – 9: Create a recovery workflow based on tabletop planning.

Documentation & BCP Framework

Call 10: Summarize the pilot results and plan next steps. Define roles and responsibilities. Make the case for a wider BCP program.

Phase 1

Identify BCP Maturity and Document Process Dependencies

Phase 1

1.1 Assess Current BCP Maturity

1.2 Establish the pilot BCP team

1.3 Identify business processes, dependencies, and alternatives

Insights & Outcomes

Define the scope for the BCP project: assess the current state of the plan, create a pilot project team and pilot project charter, and map the business processes that will be the focus of the pilot.

Participants

• BCP Coordinator
• BCP Executive Sponsor
• Pilot Business Unit Manager & Process SMEs

Step 1.1

Assess current BCP Maturity

This step will walk you through the following activities:

• Complete Info-Tech’s BCP Maturity Scorecard

This step involves the following participants:

• Executive Sponsor
• BCP Coordinator

You'll use the following tools & templates:

• BCP Maturity Scorecard

Outcomes & Insights

Establish current BCP maturity using Info-Tech’s ISO 22301-aligned BCP Maturity Scorecard.

Evaluate the current state of your continuity plan

Use Info-Tech’s Maturity Scorecard to structure and accelerate a BCP maturity assessment.

Conduct a maturity assessment to:

• Create a baseline metric so you can measure progress over time. This metric can also drive buy-in from senior management to invest time and effort into your BCP.
• Understand the scope of work to create a complete business continuity plan.
• Measure your progress and remaining gaps by updating your assessment once you’ve completed the activities in this blueprint.

This blueprint primarily addresses the first four sections in the scorecard, which align with the creation of the core components of your business continuity plan.

Info-Tech’s BCP Maturity Scorecard

Info-Tech’s maturity scorecard is aligned with ISO 22301, the international standard that describes the key elements of a functioning business continuity management system or program – the overarching set of documents, practices, and controls that support the ongoing creation and maintenance of your BCP. A fully functional BCMS goes beyond business continuity planning to include crisis management, BCP testing, and documentation management.

Audit tools tend to treat every bullet point in ISO 22301 as a separate requirement – which means there’s almost 400 lines to assess. Info-Tech’s BCP Maturity Scorecard has synthesized key requirements, minimizing repetition to create a high-level self-assessment aligned with the standard.

A high score is a good indicator of likely success with an audit.

Download Info-Tech's BCP Maturity Scorecard

Tool: BCP Maturity Scorecard

Assess your organization’s BCP capabilities.

Use Info-Tech’s BCP Maturity Scorecard to:

• Assess the overall completeness of your existing BCP.
• Track and demonstrate progress towards completion as you work through successive planning iterations with additional business units.

1. Download a copy of the BCP Maturity Scorecard. On tab 1, indicate the percent completeness for each item using a 0-10 scale (0 = 0% complete, 10 = 100% complete).
2. If you anticipate improvements in a certain area, make note of it in the “Comments” column.
3. Review a visual representation of your overall scores on tab 2.

Download Info-Tech's BCP Maturity Scorecard

"The fact that this aligns with ISO is huge." - Dr. Bernard Jones MBCI, CBCP