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Nikhil is a young and ambitious CEO of a software start-up who loves taking bold decisions based on his gut feelings. Blessed with an innate ability to persuade people and eager to soak up every ounce of knowledge about his industry, Nikhil’s organization took the market by storm within a year of its launch. Industry leaders began to take note of Nikhil, whose management style is flamboyant but fraught with risks.
Even though Nikhil’s organization made a great start, he hasn’t devoted any attention to business continuity management (BCM). His start-up has a lot of dreams and resources but no business continuity plans (BCPs).
Once COVID-19 hit, Nikhil’s organization began to wobble. Within seven months of the pandemic, Nikhil was forced to slash half his workforce and restructure the organization towards more modest objectives.
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What Is Business Continuity Management?
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Importance Of Business Continuity Management
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Threats To Business Continuity
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Stages In The Business Continuity Management Lifecycle
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Testing And Organizational Acceptance
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Get The Best Out Of Business Continuity Management
What Is Business Continuity Management?
Business continuity management can be defined as a comprehensive management process that plans and prepares an organization for efficient functioning besides ensuring that the organization is well-equipped to identify threats and recover from them. The BCM framework provides organizations with the necessary tools to be resilient during a crisis to safeguard the interests of their employees, stakeholders and customers.
Without an effective business continuity management process in place, organizations risk damaging their reputation, losing customers, or worse still, becoming irrelevant in an industry where only the best-prepared ones can survive.
Importance Of Business Continuity Management
Before analyzing the business continuity management process in greater detail, it’s worth understanding why business continuity management matters:
- Business continuity management shapes how the BCM lifecycle is structured, which means that without a competent management plan, an entire organization’s workflow can be left reeling
- Business continuity management allows organizations to identify risks and threats and nip those in the bud which are specific to the organization rather than spread across an entire industry
- The BCM framework optimizes role definition and micro-management throughout an organization, bringing maximum clarity and precision to individual and collective productivity
Threats To Business Continuity
As part of sustaining the business continuity management lifecycle and designing a BCM framework, it’s crucial to identify the threats that can potentially disrupt an organization. Some of the more common types of threats that organizations have had to deal with are outlined below:
- Natural disasters like earthquakes, floods, cyclones, or even medical emergencies like the outbreak of Ebola or COVID-19 can be devastating for organizations and must be identified as early as possible with the help of experts who can forecast worst-case scenarios swiftly and accurately
- Market fluctuations or cornering of the market by organizations with monopolistic tendencies needs to be anticipated so that organizations aren’t caught on the wrong foot
- Logistical hiccups like power outages, dysfunctional equipment or processing flaws should be accounted for when creating the BCM framework
- Cyber security measures must be foolproof and a team of cyber specialists must be on standby during key operational phases to ensure that a sudden cyber-attack doesn’t upset an entire project
Stages In The Business Continuity Management Lifecycle
The business continuity management lifecycle is the pivot around which the business continuity management process operates. The five different stages of the BCM lifecycle are explained as follows:
Impact Analysis
This stage involves conducting a business impact analysis (BIA) that differentiates between critical and non-critical organizational functions alongside conducting a threat and risk analysis (TRA) that determines recovery steps for responding to potential threats that have been identified.
Designing Of Solutions
This stage of the business continuity management lifecycle is about coming up with the most cost-effective disaster recovery solutions that fit the recovery options identified in the previous stage. The solutions designed in this stage must incorporate the crisis management command structure, secondary worksites and data replication methodology between primary and secondary work sites.
Implementation
This stage of the BCM lifecycle executes the strategies and tactics agreed upon in the first two stages, keeping everything in sync with the business continuity plan that has been originally conceived.
Testing And Organizational Acceptance
This stage has a simple purpose – to ensure that testing of the business continuity plans meets the organization’s standards and requirements. The 2008 book Exercising for Excellence published by the British Standards Institution lists three types of testing exercises for business community plans:
- Tabletop exercises: Involving a small number of people and focusing on a specific aspect of the BCPs
- Medium exercises: Among a larger group of people on multiple aspects of the BCPs
- Complex exercises: Require all aspects of the BCPs, including evacuation trials and no-notice activation, that could come into play during disasters
Maintenance
The maintenance of the BCM lifecycle keeps plans aligned with current business practices and can usually be broken down into three periodic activities:
- Confirmation of BCP information, awareness drive for employees and specific training for individuals with key roles during a disaster
- Verification of technical solutions established for recovery options
- Verification of organizational recovery procedures.
Get The Best Out Of Business Continuity Management
The BCM framework and the BCM lifecycle are demanding processes that can’t be mastered overnight. To get the best out of business continuity management, you must understand how to replace knee-jerk reactions to any crisis with a well-thought-out response. With this in mind, Harappa has come up with Manage A Crisis At Work. Through this program pathway, you’ll be able to harness an optimistic outlook, practice emotional self-regulation and improve your intuitive adaptability to help your organization deal with all kinds of potential disasters. A world-class faculty will explain the nature of crises to you and equip you with support systems that minimize damage and enable you to respond smartly.
Sign up for the Manage A Crisis At Work program and optimize your performance in business continuity management.
