Business Continuity seems like a huge undertaking for a
small business. Small business owners are focused on providing their
products and services to their customers and have little time to devote to
recovery and sustainment efforts.
However,
developing a Business Continuity Plan/Program is much easier and less time
consuming than many business owners are lead to believe. With all of the free resources available, it’s
really just a matter of committing a little extra time to developing it.
Here are
4 things you can do right now to get the process of developing and implementing
Business Continuity in your business started.
Define What Is
Critical To Your Business
Most of what is important to small business owners is
generating revenue from their products and services offerings. In that
respect, everything that generates revenue is critical to the business.
Therefore, defining what is critical to the business is very easy. If it
generates revenue for the business, it’s considered critical to the business.
In every small business I have developed plans for, I
recommended first developing a products and services catalog to capture all of
the products and services the business provides. Then with this document business owners can define what is most critical to the operation and what order things
have to be recovered in a disaster or crisis.
Define The Essential
Functions
Essential Functions are what staff do to provide the
products and services to the customers and for the business. One critical
product or service many have a few or many Essential Function that support it. Others may support multiple Critical Services. Using the Products and Services Catalog, define what
functions are essential to support the end-to-end delivery of all critical products
and services.
Determine the
Employees and Third Party Vendors Support The Essential Functions
Employees are the core delivery system of a small businesses.
They keep the business operating and are an essential part of most small
and large businesses alike. However, unlike large businesses, the small business doesn't have the same resources or size of workforce to maintain a limited crew for a
period of time, as is the case with Organizational Continuity. With this
in mind, the small business owner has to consider that all of the stall are
critical in some way to the operations of the business. Therefore, a critical staffing plan is necessary. The same thing going for 3rd party
or vendor support, but in this case, the vendor or 3rd party is
obligated to provide staff regardless of the condition (unless safety is at
stake). This should be agreed upon in service agreements and contracts
beforehand.
Determine the Support
Requirement that are Necessary to support Staff and Third Party Vendors
This will be the part that requires the most detailed
consideration. What services and required necessities do the staff need
to perform their jobs at the most basic level without compromising quality or
output during a crisis or disaster? What alternate facilities are
available to conduct operations?
What level of safety and security is required? What IT Services do they
need access to? How will these things be secured? Who is
responsible for securing them? These are detailed considerations that
need to be made in order to recovery or sustain revenue streams for the
business.
Armed with this information, you can now begin to develop
strategies and actions plans to recover or sustain your business though any
kind of crisis or disaster.
There
are all kinks of scary reasons you should have a Business Continuity Plan in
place for your business, but those are not the reasons you should be concerned
most with. The most important reason is
to have the capability to recover or sustain your business in the event of a
crisis or disaster is: It’s your
business. It’s worth protecting.
Summary:
1) Develop a Products and Service Catalog (not required, but it's a good idea)
2) Define what is critical to the business (Critical Services)
3) Define the Essential Functions that support the Critical Services
4) Determine the staff that support Essential Functions
5) Determine what support is required for staff during a crisis or disaster
Business Continuity is not insurance for your business. Business Continuity is assurance that your business will continue to operate during a crisis or disaster.
And that is just good business.
Mike Minzes is the Founder and CEO of INEVOLVE SB, a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning and Implementation company located in Kennesaw, Georgia. Mike has over 20 year of experience on the Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Industry. For more information on INEVOLVE SB, please visit them at GOBCP.NET .
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