Business continuity plans are a dire necessity today because of the rapidly changing market and global economic conditions. As a business owner, you must continuously check for risks that could hamper your milestones and deliverables. In this article at Corporate Compliance Insights, Matthew Watson explains why you must focus on business continuity plans in this ever-changing era.
Business Continuity Plans and Resilience
Per new studies, leaders were forced to check the feasibility of their business continuity plans after the pandemic engulfed the entire world. Now, industry auditors want more proof about how businesses take care of their Guide to Business Continuity & Resilience (GRC) roadmap to withstand the volatile business environment. So, in-house audits to stabilize Business Continuity Plans (BCPs) have become essential.
Audit Kit
Auditing business continuity plans encompasses four stages. If you have not created a roadmap until now, here are the defined phases:
- Evaluate current business status – For foolproof business continuity plans, you must first analyze how the present outline is faring in terms of governance, risk assessment, and Business Impact Analysis (BIA), suggests Watson. Check your IT processes and in-house software and systems, and encourage top management to use the results to handle enterprise risks.
- Review your corporate strategy model – Examine the key business strategies related to crisis handling, business continuity, and technological recovery. Find out if they have enough information for process and IT disaster management communication and improvement.
- Have an execution roadmap – Once you have documented your strategies, check if you have the responsibilities assigned to the proper roles. Additionally, find out whether the designated individual knows what to do when the expected risks strike.
- Conduct quality assurance tests – You must continually evaluate business continuity plans to understand their efficacy. Use a risk that you have identified during a risk assessment session to develop simulations. Conducting a stress test would help you find out improvement areas.
Focus Zones
Before you start working on enhancing the business continuity plans, you must have a fair idea about the areas that would reflect developments. Here are the focus zones:
- Governance – You can create a separate team that would monitor the various organizational obligations and ownership. However, Watson suggests that you should include top executives only for greater visibility and faster policy or process adoption.
- Risk in continuity – Many organizations have created a temporary risk management team for this purpose. To stabilize organizational risk tolerance, you must have a permanent crew overlooking the trends for a better recovery rate.
- Effect on business – Studying the impact of issues on business creates the basic framework for a business continuity management program (BCM). You should set recovery priorities for all the key processes and resources.
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