Introduction to business continuity planning

[Audio/Visual: Upbeat music starts playing as the screen shows a blue grid texture background displaying the Regional Business Partner Network logo, with the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment logo at the bottom left of the screen and the New Zealand Government logo at the bottom right of the screen. The screen then changes to a solid blue background with the title Business Continuity Planning (BCP): A practical guide for businesses, with the Business Canterbury in the bottom right-hand side of the screen. The music plays throughout the video.] 

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If you're running a business in New Zealand, you know what disruption is. You don't need anyone to tell you about it. Over the past few years, business owners have dealt with an unprecedented amount of disruption.

Everything from economic volatility, changing the way we operate, through a pandemic, supply chain challenges and in some areas of the country, natural disasters.

Every day, challenges are thrown at businesses. As you'll see in the attached guidance templates, business continuity planning is all about thinking about those disruptions before they occur and getting ahead of them so when they do happen, we're ready to get back up and running as quickly as possible. 

Throughout this video, we'll talk about what business continuity planning is, why it's important, and how to get started using the attached guidance templates.

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A business continuity plan covers everything within your business. It really focuses on, should a disruption happen, how would you keep things going or how would you recover? Everything from contacting your people, contacting your stakeholders, getting in touch with key customers and suppliers to managing cash flow.

The real value in the business continuity plan is having a plan before that disruption occurs. A simple test for a business continuity plan is checking, does it cover these four things?  What needs to keep going within your business? Who's going to be in charge? What to do first, and how are you going to recover? If your business continuity plan covers those four things, then it's doing its job.

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So let's talk about why business recovery plans matter. They're not just boxer tick. They set you up for potential disruption in the future and ensure that your operations will continue to keep moving.

Operations are the first thing that you need to identify, but there's several things to look at.

What are the most important parts of your operations? What's critical and what are the dependencies for those?

If you can identify those, you can ensure that you prioritise the most important parts in your business.

Secondly, people. Your staff, customers, suppliers, stakeholders. Communication in these times becomes even more important. How are you going to communicate with them, and who's going to be making decisions?

Thirdly, finances. Payroll keeps going, supplier payments don't stop. How are you going to ensure that you are in the right position and have your cash flow continuing?

It's really important to ensure that you know your organisation inside out, and what you can afford to change and what you need to prioritise.

Finally, your resilience and recovery. As you work through your continuity plan, this will ensure that you've got a clear outline of how you're going to make decisions and why. This becomes important not just in the time that you're using the plan, but also after the fact. If you need to demonstrate to your bank, your insurer, what decisions you made and how you made them, your business continuity plan becomes critically important.

Your business continuity plan helps you decide what's important so that you can make calculated decisions rather than just trying to manage the impact of decisions being made around you.

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Before we get to the how, there's a shift in thinking that can really help as you work through your business continuity plan. What is critically important to your business and what can't you do without?

Whether that's your revenue, your staff, your IT systems. Identifying those things first, and then thinking about the things that could go wrong with them is far better than creating a list of every potential situation that could go wrong.

What we often find when producing a business continuity plan is that people map out so many scenarios that they end up with a really long document that it doesn't cover the core aspects of their business. A long business continuity plan is hard to use and hard to keep up to date. What's more important than these situations is a shorter, concise document that really covers the key things within your business and can be regularly kept up to date so that when you actually need it, it's not two years old.

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As we get into building out your business continuity plan, it's important to remember 4 key steps: assess, prepare, respond and review.

Firstly, assess. What could go wrong and what matters most. Have a look at your business and look at what are the most critical processes that you need to keep operating through any form of disruption.

When I build a business continuity plan, I like to look at the critical processes not as business functions like finance, but as processes. So describing it as, issue and invoice and collect payment from my customers. That makes it easier as you work through your plan to identify what could go wrong and how you would fix those.

How many of these that you'll have within your business will vary depending on the size of your business and how you operate. Once you've identified what these processes are, you can then start to think about what are the realistic disruptions that could occur within your business and how you'd manage them if they occurred.

How long might they last, how impactful they might be and what alternatives you have.

The number of processes that you identify within your business is going to vary and there's no right or wrong answer. Small businesses might only identify a few, and larger businesses might have a much longer list.

The important thing here is that you've really thought about what those critical functions are and what backups, alternates, or other options you have available to your business.

[Visual: Screen changes to title slide with text: Prepare: Turn assessment into a practical business continuity plan]

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Step 2. Prepare. This is the core of the plan, turning those priorities into actions. Where are your data backups stored? Can you operate out of alternate locations? Do you have other staff that you can call on? What are your full backs?

These are the kind of things that you want to answer in your business continuity plan so that you have an outline of what you could do when the pressure hits.

[Visual: Screen changes to title slide with text: Respond: deploy the plan in the first hours, days and weeks.]

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What happens when your business is disrupted? Now is the time to pull that plan out. You've built it, you've kept it up to date and now's the time to put it into action.

Firstly, establish the facts. What do you know and what don't you know? This could be an evolving situation and you're not necessarily going to have all of the information from the outset but referencing back to your business continuity plan that you've put together and made those decisions when you've had more time to think about them is a really important way to get your business back up and running as quickly as possible.

As you bring your business back online, it's really important to communicate with your teams, your communities, your suppliers, and your customers. You're not necessarily going to have all the information right from the outset but try and be as clear and concise as you can. Remove the emotion where possible. It can also be really helpful if you let people know when to expect their next communication.

Depending on the situation, recovery could take some time, days, weeks, months. But now's the time to reference back to your business continuity plan. You've spent that time building it. What are those priority areas that need to come back online first in order to ensure that you get back to normal operations as quickly as possible.

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Often overlooked, reviewing your business continuity plan is one of the most important steps. You've put all the time into building this out. The worst thing that could happen is that when you go to pull it out in a time of need, it's no longer up to date.

A simple way to do this can be put a reminder in your calendar for every two months. Pull that plan out and have a look at it. Have your critical functions within your business changed. Have key people within your business changed? Make updates to the plan.

You can also run a simple test. Do the critical functions and the potential disruptions and your plan to recover from them still make sense? It's really important to keep these plans up to date. There's nothing worse than when a situation develops that you no longer have a relevant plan. If you pull it out and it's out of date, it's not going to help you. So put that time in the calendar and ensure you keep this relevant.

[Visual: Screen changes to title slide with text: Choosing a simple or detailed BCP template.]

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Fortunately, you're not in this alone. Alongside this video, we've created a guide with some great examples and step by step instructions on how to fill out one of two business continuity plan templates we've created.

First, we've got a simplified template. This is perfect if you don't have anything in place at the moment and you just want to get something off the ground. It'll cover off all of the key fundamentals, key people, key processes, key outcomes. Perfect for a small business or someone without a whole lot of processes.

We've also got a more detailed template that's great for businesses with more moving parts that might be more staff, more locations, 

more customers or more suppliers. The detailed template will give you more flexibility and go into a lot more detail around how you're going to recover should a situation arise. The detailed plan also covers things like delegated authority and communications plans.

Who's going to make the decisions and who's going to talk about them? The key thing to remember is that there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to a business continuity plan. It needs to be built for your specific business. If you're in the hospitality industry or if you're in the professional services sector, your business continuity plans will look very different. Even 2 businesses within the same sector. If you're in different locations, you could have quite different continuity plans. The scenarios you face could be different.

For example, if you're in a flood prone area, you're going to need to plan for things that someone else might not.

The templates really are designed to be starting points. They're not a fixed form. Feel free to change it to suit your business.

The key thing here is that at the end of the day, you walk away with a plan that's tailored to your business and when a situation arises, you've identified the key things. You can pull it out and put it into action.

[Visual: Screen changes to title slide with text: Getting started with your BCP.]

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Our Business Continuity plan is really designed to be a practical tool to help protect your business, your finances, your staff and your assets. Developing this can ensure that when disruption hits, you're ready and can recover as quickly as possible.

It can be daunting starting one of these from scratch. There's a lot of information, but it doesn't have to be hard. Open up one of our templates, take a look, nominate a leader and ask them to just jot down a few ideas.

Getting something down is better than nothing. It can develop overtime. Make it a weekly process that you and your team sit down with and engage in. It's also really important to let your team know that this plan exists. When disruption hits, you might not be there and you might not be ready to respond. If they know it's there, they can pull it out, check who they need to contact and what the recovery plan is.

They can get the plan into action before you're there. So open up our guide, check out the examples, and get into one of the templates. It doesn't have to be hard. This is here to help your business recover as quickly as possible when disruption hits.

[Visual: screen changes to a blue grid texture background displaying the Regional Business Partner Network logo, with the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment logo at the bottom left of the screen and the New Zealand Government logo at the bottom right of the screen.]

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