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How to Business Continuity Policy BCP Plan in Your Company?

You need to have a robust and structured Business Continuity Policy Plan to prepare your business and employees for a crisis. Here is how to BCP work for your company which could be an BCP plan example for your businesses to implement to follow.

 

Putting Together A Business Continuity Plan

1. Establish organisational goals and objectives. This establishes a clear BCP focus and helps align subsequent steps to be taken.
2. List the core activities and functions required to keep the business going. These may be critical or revenue generating personnel, main website and as well as IT infrastructure. Through such identification, you will be able to include and prioritize these into your plan, from split teams and split locations to remote working and flexi-work.
3. Conduct a business impact analysis. This is a process which enables you to evaluate the likelihood and potential impact of an identified crisis on your business activities and functions. Through quantifying the likelihood and potential impact both on scales of 1 (least) to 5 (most), you will score the crisis’ risk rating.
4. Conduct risk mitigation. With a focus on mitigating key risks, you may consider two approaches to be taken. You may sort according to risk rating and work from the top of the list. Alternatively, you may determine an arbitrary benchmark and work on those with risk ratings above the benchmark. In carrying out risk mitigation measures, utilize solutions that will reduce either the potential impact or likelihood of occurrence so as to lower risk rating to your acceptable level.
5. Designate roles and responsibilities for all employees. All employees have a role to play in making BCP a success. You should designate a core team to helm efforts to draft policies, maintain its relevance with changing threats as well as be the key point of contact with regulators and where employees require clarification. For each functional team, there should be a representative as well, so as to ensure that BCP awareness is maintained at the individual employee level. All employees are to ensure their employee details and next-of-kin details are updated as well, so as to facilitate contact in times of emergency and to facilitate contact tracing.
6. Communication, training, test run and annual review. You should establish an annual schedule of activities related to sustaining and improving BCP policy and processes. This is such as half-yearly communication and training for all staff to ensure they maintain awareness of best practices, yearly test run as a sandbox exercise to test their readiness through actual execution as well as the annual review of policy and processes based on regulatory recommendations, stakeholder feedback or industry best practices.

 

 
Above is BCP plan example which you can implement for your company or business to follow, 3E Accounting Singapore also prepare free download of BCP plan template which you can use as templates to suit your business requirement.