Business Continuity Management (BCM)

BCM is a necessity today for businesses. Our trained staff will assist you in developing the right plan, required to ensure your business is up and running immediately after an event

SoJo has designed a structured framework to assist companies develop their Strategic BCM Plan. Having a Plan to recover your business, manage events for your employees, and a plan to support your customers, is critical to your success

A business continuity plan (BCP) is an active plan to help ensure your business processes can continue during a time of emergency or disaster. Such emergencies or disasters might include a fire or any other case where business is not able to occur under normal conditions

Disaster Recovery ensures you can recover your IT systems in a timely manner to support your customers, employees, vendors, and meet your organizations financial obligations

BCM Planning has the following steps:

Identify Scope

As in most business planning processes, the first thing that must be done is to define the scope and objectives of the plan being made. In this case, it is the Business Continuity Plan

Form your BCM Team

There is a need to establish a governance structure within the BCP in order for management to have order and control in its conduct. This implies care and prudence in choosing the people who will be assigned the task of planning for the continuity of the business

Conduct BIAs

Business Impact Analysis (BIA). Conducting a BIA is crucial since its results will be the major input in business continuity planning. Through BIA, the team will be able to predict or forecast the potential impacts or consequences of business operations

Strategizing & Planning

Based on the results of BIA, the team will then identify response and recovery strategies and plans to address the effects of the disruption, and present them in detail. It is in this phase where the team will provide details on the arrangements and measures that the company will undertake in order to mitigate threats and risks

Writing the Plan

This involves the writing of the Business Continuity Plan. Usually, there will be a first draft, since the succeeding steps involve testing the recovery plans and strategies, making adjustments and re-testing until such time that The Plan can be finalized

Testing the Plan

The prevention and mitigation strategies formulated in Step 4 will now be implemented. This involves communication of the plan to all members of the organization, making them aware of their part in it. This involves training them on their roles if the event does happen. External stakeholders should also be made aware of the plan

Adjustments

The program may need to be adjusted due to the following:

Evaluation and testing of the strategies may reveal that they are ineffective or inefficient

There may be deficiencies in the strategies

Some roles and responsibilities are vague and need clarification

Change in the roles and members of the business continuity team

Introduction or occurrence of new or additional factors or circumstances, such as new equipment, opening of a new branch, relocation of operations, and new technology or system that modified critical processes

Improvements

Since testing and evaluations are done periodically, there is an equal chance that the program has to be adjusted several times. It follows that the Business Continuity Plan will have to be rewritten to accommodate or reflect these adjustments