Design the strategy to ensure continuity

Implementing a strategy to ensure –in part– the business resilience mainly involves defining and establishing a set of actions to restore business processes or services in a reasonable period of time, depending on the company’s urgency and based on its strategies, context, and customers.

These strategies are implemented in the Business Continuity Plan (BCP), which, in general, must comprise the solutions required to restore business processes and services in a specific time, in the event of disruptive incidents.

In addition to the activities, BCPs must define the roles and responsibilities regarding the processes allowing triggering response actions to events interrupting the company’s regular operations. These responses –as well as subsequent recovery– must take into account the consequences of such events, and consider important aspects such as the well-being of people, alternatives –at all levels within the organization– to respond to any event, prevention actions required to avoid additional loss or unavailability of critical services or processes. In this regard, another key aspect is defining a communication strategy, particularly knowing how to implement it in case of emergency. Therefore, it is necessary to define specific communication strategies, as well as rules, guidelines, people in charge, means, etc.

Finally, in order to ensure that everything projected in the plan works, tests and trials are required. To this purpose, simulation of potential situations should be planned on a regular basis, not only as a way of verifying the plan effectiveness, but also as a way of identifying improvement opportunities allowing reducing the impact of possible interruption events, and giving peace of mind to the workers and the company as a whole.