Prepare your business for disruption
Preparing your business to cope with disruptions is extremely important, even more so for those with vulnerable customers. Making sure you can deliver your services no matter what is thrown at your business will increase its reputation and help your business grow. The first step on the road to improving your business’s preparedness is completing a business impact analysis.
The business impact analysis form is a tool that helps you to find out:
- what your business’s 'critical functions' are (e.g. provide elderly residents with 24 hour care)
- the minimum amount of resources needed to deliver a function
- what contingency measures you already have in place to preserve these resources during a disruption.
By working through the form it allows you to find points of potential failure and implement more robust contingency measures to cope.
For example by completing the forms, you find that you have the critical function of ‘provide elderly residents with 24 hour care’; five people are needed to perform the function so your current contingency is having a team of eight trained people. You may feel the likelihood of not being able to get a team of five together is too high and that by not having a full team it would have an unexceptionally large impact on your business. To combat this and improve your business’s resilience you could consider putting in an additional contingency measure. Such as having, a contact number for agency staff which could temporarily fill the vacant posts at short notice.
We have produced a mocked up example of a business impact analysis form for both domiciliary care and residential care providers. The example explains how to complete the form and gives an idea of what information goes in each box.
Example Domiciliary Care Business Impact Analysis Stage One (Word 43kb opens in new window)
Example Residential Care Business Impact Analysis Stage One (Word 44kb opens in new window)
Example Domiciliary Care Business Impact Analysis Stage Two (Word 31kb opens in new window)
Example Residential Care Business Impact Analysis Stage Two (Word 31kb opens in new window)
To find more business continuity resources check out our business continuity page
Once you have a business continuity plan in place you can test it to find out if your contingency measures stand up by using our exercise pack.
If you would like an exercise pack sent to you please contact us by:
Email at heps@eastriding.gov.uk
Telephone: (01482) 393051.
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