Learn about contingency planning that companies develop to ensure business continuity and disaster recovery so operations are not adversely disrupted by emergencies.
What Does Business Contingency Planning Involve?
Contingency is all about developing responses in anticipation to various situations that are likely to impact your business. Although a lot of negative events probably come to one’s mind when we talk about situations, but taking into consideration disaster preparedness and business continuity is what should be at the focal point of the process. This needs to be considered while writing your business plan. If someone is prepared for disaster, they can sleep peacefully. Read on to find out why your business needs to have a business continuity plan.
1. The Reasons for Disaster Recovery Planning (drp)
Businesses are likely to encounter situations that could negatively affect key business functions. If recovery times are slow following an incident, this could dramatically affect a firms overall future. These situations could result in lost customers, lost employees, lost data, or even the loss of the business itself. Therefore, having an adequate business continuity plan is essential to all of your business processes.
2. Events that the Contingency Plan may Include
As mentioned earlier, in order to ensure business continuity, a good recovery planning policy must incorporate events that could interrupt operations:
- Natural Disasters: Fires, storms, and earthquakes.
- Crisis – customers or employees being threatened, workplace accidents, as well as injuries sustained at the workplace.
- Personnel – Deaths of top managers, or employees going on strike.
- Data loss – Loss caused by disaster, cybercriminal activity, etc.
- Mismanagement – theft, accidental destruction, and negligence in performing key duties.
- Product issues – Huge orders requiring the redistribution of factory resources, or the withdrawal of product.
3. The Process of Developing Contingency Plans
There are steps in developing disaster response procedures that must begin with preparations and conclude with suggested measures to recover operations. The following steps, then, should help you to go through the whole process in steps:
- Perform a business impact analysis
- Determine the likelihood and impact of risks
- Develop a process for each item
- Look at alternatives for business continuity
4. Rank possible events in order of priority for organization’s respond
Number every event that is possible from one to 10. This ranking procedure should be dependent upon the seriousness of events effect on the operations of a company. For instance, an earthquake may receive 10 points, but fires that strike at specific locations within the plant may receive 3.
The second factor for ranking has to do with estimating how likely an event is. It can be helpful to draw up a graph where 1 represents events occurring once every 100 years, and 10 represents events likely occurring once every month. Multiply the effect of each event with its probability to occur, and you will have the overall estimate for each.
Use this scoring system to order events, and start working on business continuity action plan measures that have a higher score first. For lower scores, you are encouraged to think of an overall process of recovery.
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