Business Continuity Plan (BCP) experts at RSM bring some of the deepest and most thorough understanding of underlying risk and incident management issues.

This, combined with experience in multiple sectors and tools in crisis management, allows us to assist you in identifying, managing, and recovering from potentially devastating incidents. We can help you avoid the mistakes that many organisations make when developing business continuity and disaster recovery plans.

When implementing a BCP, the purpose and objectives are commonly summarised as follows:Does your business have a BCP plan?

  • To provide guidance and clarity to the organisation’s senior leadership team throughout the occurrence of a disruptive incident which interrupts standard operating procedures
  • To ensure that the organisation adopts a structured and measurable approach to effectively stabilising the situation, continuing critical business functions, mitigating the impact to the business and recovering from all losses sustained throughout the disruptive incident
  • To mitigate the impact of all disruption-related risks which have the potential to significantly cripple the standard operating conditions and result in harm to the organisation, its people, its customers, and all other relevant stakeholders

Structure of BCPs

Whilst each BCP is structured differently and must be tailored to fit both the needs of the oranisation and the context of the environment which they operate in, the following are essential by best practice guidelines such as ISO 22301 - Business Continuity Management Systems and ISO 22317 - Guidelines for BIA:

  • Governance structure and business continuity management team
  • Business continuity management roles and responsibilities
  • Criticality phased activation and deactivation thresholds and process
  • Initial risk assessment for known disruption-related risks
  • Business impact analysis methodology and identify critical business functions (including maximum acceptable outage periods)
  • Detailed recovery strategies for each critical business function (including recovery time objectives)
  • Alternative recovery site and resource requirements
  • Communications strategy
  • Post-incident review process
  • Business continuity management training, maintenance and testing requirements and process
  • Emergency management contact listings

Methodology

To effectively utilise a BCP, the following principles are considered by best practice guidelines to be essential to the identification, mitigation, and management of disruptive incidents.

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Development and implementation process

At RSM, we recommend a four-stage approach for the development and implementation of a BCP to ensure that the end result is a robust and valuable plan which identifies and outlines detailed recovery strategies for each of the organisations' critical business functions.

BCP at RSM is taken via a four stage approach for the development and implementation of a BCP.

These recovery strategies are typically designed to cover the following:

  • Loss of key people
  • Loss of access to buildings and physical workspaces
  • Loss of key systems
  • Loss of critical suppliers

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For further information about crisis management and business continuity planning

Do you have a question, or require assistance, in relation to creating a BCP plan for your business? Get in touch with your local RSM Office for more information.