The fast track to a Business Continuity Plan
Writing a Business Continuity Plan doesn’t need to take months or even weeks. By using our ‘5 Minute’ Business Continuity templates you could have a working plan in a couple of hours. You could then stop there or as we recommend, use it as a great base to write a more in depth plan once you have the time.
'Five minute' plan
Broadly speaking, the consequences of a disruption tend to be quite similar regardless of the cause. With this in mind having a generic plan which deals with as many outcomes as possible is ideal. The ‘five minute’ plan will make you think about the most important things you need to keep your business running day to day and how it would be affected by some of the most common consequences of a disruption. It then asks what you can do to increase the resilience of the things you’ve identified so that they can still function through a disruption.
Five minute business continuity plan (pdf 735kb opens in new window)
Putting together an 'office grab bag'
Often a consequence of an emergency will be that you’ll have to evacuate your premises or office most often with little warning and at short notice. At this point you don’t want to be scrambling around looking for those important documents you’d printed off and put somewhere in the office. It makes sense to have what we call an ‘office grab bag’. This is a bag that you can place a copy of all the essential items you’d need to run your business. It can then be stored securely and in a place easily accessible so that in the event of incident it can be quickly grabbed. Reducing the disruption to your business and allowing it to continue from an alternative location. Our ‘five minute’ grab flyer will give you an idea of what to place in your office grab bag.
Five minute office grab bag flyer (pdf 226kb opens in new window)
How resilient are your suppliers?
All businesses rely on suppliers and other organisations to keep functioning. The majority have business continuity plans in place, if they don’t are you willing to accept the risk of not receiving a vital delivery or service. We suggest that you find out how resilient your suppliers are and we've put together a checklist of questions to ask your suppliers.
Five minute supplier checklist (pdf 220kb opens in new window)
Crisis Management
Should the worst happen and your business is affected by a disruption, spending five minutes thinking about how you’ll manage the situation now will mean that when disruption strikes, your business will be able to cope much better then if you hadn't. Crisis Management isn’t complex; it’s simply identifying the people who’ll take charge, the documentation and equipment they’ll need as well as the key people to complete their requests and finally a location for them to work from. For a small business it may just be the one person. To help we have put together a ‘five minute’ crisis management plan for you to complete.
Five minute crisis management (pdf 759kb opens in new window)
Recovering from a disruption
Recovery can often be a slow process but it doesn’t need to be. Having a logical, structured approach and the right information early, key decisions can be made quickly to aid your business recovery. We have put together a simple analysis form so that you can identify any problems which may impact on your business. Once the problems have been identified we’ve included a recovery action plan. Use this to list and prioritise the issues that need resolving and how the issues will be resolved.
Five minute recovery plan (pdf 694kb opens in new window)
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