Business continuity planning

In your business continuity plan, you should aim to cover the following areas: 
   

• People – focus on the welfare of people before containing and controlling the disruption. Develop incident response flowcharts or checklists by considering different emergency situations and develop an evacuation protocol. Take into consideration working from home procedures, etc.   

• Crisis management – can you inform your staff and customers about the event before they find out about it elsewhere? It might be worth appointing a spokesperson to handle communications. Also, take time to decide how best to handle the incident and work quickly to get an action plan in place.   

• Business recovery – the first 60 minutes after an emergency occurs is critical in reducing the impact on your business. Start by determining the resources and personnel needed to restore crucial operations and identify responsibilities for executing recovery actions, including systems recovery, stock recovery, equipment recovery, and so on.  

• Contacts – consider creating a list of internal and external individuals and companies who you may need to call upon for support in case of an emergency. These might include key staff, suppliers, utility providers, neighbouring businesses, your landlord or your insurance company. Also think about having an IT specialist at hand in the event of a cyber-attack. You could go so far as to add details of locksmiths, glaziers, electricians and plumbers, ensuring that you keep these contacts updated.   

When creating your plan, remember that different situations will require different responses, so it’s a good idea to look at worst case scenarios as well as what you could do if there was only a slight emergency or partial outage.  

A great starting point is to begin by looking at the main functions of your business, and what the impact could be if your business faced a threat. Key business functions can vary depending on what your business does, but in simple terms, think of this as what your business needs to operate.  

For example, if you run an online shop, it will be your stock and your IT infrastructure that you need to function.   

It might also be useful to consider ranking threats to your business in order from high to low.   

Threats to consider could include cyber (IT) attacks, pandemics, natural disasters, fires, floods, electrical storms, earthquakes, gas leaks and power cuts.  

You will then need to take into consideration the impact that these threats will have upon your business.  

This is known as a Business Impact Analysis (BIA). Impacts usually include loss of income, loss of custom, delay in service delivery resulting in poor customer sentiment and the potential for regulatory fines.  

Once you’ve decided areas of business functions, threats and carried out impact analysis, you should list which resources your company depends upon.  

This will include key staff, internal and external contacts, essential equipment, and company documents.  

Consider ranking these resources from high to low in order of importance, and establish how long your company can survive without that resource in place.  

Your key staff are the employees that your business can’t function without. Consider staff who lead your services, who manage the finances, those who manage customers and their accounts and those who know the regulations associated in your business and industry.      

It is wise to make copies of business documents and store them off-site. The type of documents you usually need to continue running your business are usually banking info, HR info, tax returns, companies house info, insurance papers and utility bills.   

It is also worth listing data and other assets that you need to run your business.  

These usually include databases to conduct client work projects, any company assets such as machinery and manufacturing equipment, any IT equipment including hardware and software packages and any supply and materials required to manufacture or deliver your products/services.  

If you have back up files make a note of where these are stored and how they are accessed. 

You will need to determine your business's contingency plan which will allow your business to continue running if a disaster was to happen.  

Think about where you will operate from and what equipment you will need to continue to operate.  

Consider who to contact if you needed to rent vehicles, or IT equipment or who you could go to if you need to outsource services such as printing.  

You may wish to think about running your business from a local hotel if it has business facilities if possible or if more space is needed could you look at a short-term let on a warehouse that has business office space too.  

If the business can be ran from home, make a list of what equipment is needed or if your staff's own equipment can be utilised.   

Your business continuity plan should be a robust, working document which should be kept up to date and reviewed regularly.  

Test your plan against various mock-up situations outlined in this guide.  

There are a few ways you can assess your plan against different scenarios including simulating the scenario, carrying out checklists and running question and answer sessions with your staff to ensure they know their role if the scenario was to happen.  

It may help to review your business continuity plan annually and carry out this review alongside testing to ensure that your plan remains effective.  

If you want to understand and prioritise the threats to your business with the international standard for business continuity, you can look at international standard ISO 22301, which specifies the requirements for a management system to protect against, reduce the likelihood of, and ensure your business recovers from disruptive incidents.  

You can read more about this here.

GOV.UK's business continuity management toolkit can help you create a plan and shape it to fit the needs of your business.

Alternatively, you might wish to build your business continuity plan from scratch or use a tool or purpose-built software to help.  

Some local authorities also provide templates that are downloadable. Search for your local authority resources here: https://ww.gov.uk/find-local-council