Contingency planning should be an integral part of your overall business continuity management process. Business Continuity and emergency planning requires a thorough review of your organization’s entire operation for safety and operational vulnerabilities. Following a business impact assessment (BIA) methodology, you should review essential operations as well as key suppliers, business, and data partners as well as infrastructure components that are deemed vital. Planning must include detailed contingency plans that will guide your organization in performing its critical functions during a disruption or disaster.
All Hands can assist you with this process by identifying all critical processes and by evaluating threats at every location, identifying all the key components, their interdependencies, and their relative importance.
This planning will include:
- A review of all hazards and threats quantifying the potential for impact.
- Triage to identify processes, systems, functions, and partners that are most critical and at risk.
- Developing contingency and disaster-recovery plans for each process.
- Identification of mitigation steps.
- A review of the functionality, practicality, and cost-benefit of various contingency and recovery options.
- Crisis communication and notification plans for employees and stakeholders.
Contingency Plan
We will develop specific details of your individual contingency plans by working closely with your users and IT personnel. Contingency plans will address the following areas:
- Objective of the plan (e.g., continue normal operations, continue in a degraded mode, abort the function as quickly as safely possible, etc.)
- Criteria for invoking the plan (e.g., local disaster, experiencing serious system failures, etc.)
- Expected life of the plan (How long can operations continue in contingency operating mode?)
- Roles, responsibilities and authority
- Plan creation and checkout of resource constraints to plan for each contingency and objective
- Training on and testing of plans
- Procedures for operating in contingency mode
- Resource plan for operating in contingency mode (e.g., staffing, scheduling, materials, supplies, facilities, temporary hardware and software, communications, etc.)
- Criteria for returning to normal operating mode
- Procedures for returning to normal operating mode
- Procedures for recovering lost or damaged data.