APPRENTICE TIPS: A need for business continuity plan
Natural and man-made disasters underscore the challenges of seamless disaster recovery in the real world. As a business owner, you don’t want the first time you think about disaster recovery to be during an actual disaster. After a fire, flood or data loss, being prepared will hopefully decrease the damage done by the event, and get your business back on track sooner.
We rarely get a head’s up that a disaster is ready to strike. Even with some lead time, though, multiple things can go wrong; every incident is unique and unfolds in unexpected ways. One of the best things you can do to prepare yourself is develop a disaster recovery or business continuity plan (BCP); others do name this as business contingency plan.
Small businesses are defenseless to failure when they’re impacted by significant events, business owner need to recover in a timely fashion; this is because, no matter what business fixed costs continue even when the business doors are not opened.
Quenching from planning a disaster before it happens will force you, as business owner, to do it on the fly and make decisions when you’re stressed.
Fundamentally, disaster plans for your business should assess and create plans for different scenarios both short and long term. Key leaders and decision makers should be identified and tasked as executers in the event. On top of that, backups and alternative forms of communication are crucial to ensure that there are no less than two alternatives to curb the event in a smaller- and larger-scale disaster.
Normally, the Business owners do make a few key mistakes over and over in their emergency-preparedness plans. Firstly, they don’t account for loss of critical people nor planning for the stress and trauma of staff. Secondly, the mistakenly don’t make emergency plan accessible at the office, or making plans that are too generic, too detailed or stale, in fact this would confuse the staff and remain in pale.
Furthermore, business owners do fail to address communication choke points and having PR issues related to recovery event. They normally ignore the setting up of alternative emergency operations center (EOC) or recovery sites, or having physical access issues with alternate site. The worse of all, business owners do believe that outside assistance and insurance will take care of everything, which is habitually not the case. These are the crucial areas to address prior to finalizing your business disaster plan.
In creating a continuity plan for your business you must assess the business risks if the event happens. You need to know the threats that could damage your business, and determine how they might affect you.
You also need to prioritize business functions. On this I mean, you should decide the order in which certain business operations will be restored in the event of an interruption. Also you need to develop presentation and mitigation strategies. On this you definitely need to come up with strategies around the most important functions to prevent and mitigate the types of disasters you may encounter.
When your business continuity plan is completely done, have your team walk through the steps of your disaster recovery plan to test it out. Ensure that employees know what to do, identify areas that need improvement, and routinely check plans and make updates as needed to account for staff change and lessons learned.
Your employees are critical to your company’s success, so it’s important to realize this and show that same consideration to ensure their safety. Looking this at one angle it may seem like a lot of things to keep track of, bust in fact, these events do happen, therefore it is prominently best to be ready for the worst as this would put you and your business in a safe position as opposed to events coming in as a surprise.
