What if your business is impacted by a natural disaster or your offices are suddenly closed due to unforeseen circumstances, say, a global pandemic? What's next? Is your business built to weather these storms? While nobody likes to think about the worst case scenario, planning ahead and putting together a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) will ensure that your organization is prepared for anything.
While my company has had a BCP in place for years, COVID-19 provoked us to ensure that we had an actionable, pandemic-specific plan readily accessible. After creating our initial BCP and adjusting it to apply to our current reality, we felt our experience could be beneficial to other organizations, so we're sharing our process.
Start from ScratchIn computer science, if hardware or a network has been partially destroyed or rendered inoperative, there's a limited function necessary to keep it going – that process of how the machine or system shuts down is called "graceful degradation." So, in a pandemic where your people could be out due to illness or permanently gone, you can apply the same question to your business: How do you degrade gracefully?
Start by evaluating the most critical functions of your organization that are needed in order to remain in business. Think of it like this – what is the thing that is 100% necessary to your business operations, what is the last thing you can discard before your doors would need to shutter? Once you've settled on these critical functions, work backwards. What do you need in order to keep these functions, well, functioning?
For our business, we determined that our most critical function was maintaining service for our existing customers. While adding ..
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