How to Choose a GOOD Business Continuity Plan Template

Choosing the right business continuity plan template ensures that you get a business continuity plan that is practical, effective AND compliant. It means that you can protect your organisation from significant, unexpected disruptions and be able to demonstrate that to third parties and external evaluators. 

Why Selecting the Right Business Continuity Template Matters    

The problem with finding the right business continuity template is that there are so many to choose from and there are so many free, poor-quality, outdated templates that won’t deliver the kind of quality needed.  This wastes the time and efforts of both you and anyone else who has the task of creating a business continuity plan for your organisation. That’s why we have produced this free business continuity plan template evaluation guide to help you separate the good from the not-so-good.   

Key Features to look for in a Business Continuity Template        

A good business continuity plan template will have several attributes that will support you in creating a robust plan that will also demonstrate to third parties that your organisation has developed its business continuity plan in line with accepted good practice.  So when considering which business continuity plan template to use for your organisation, consider criteria such as:

• A practical but comprehensive approach to establishing your organisations priorities under different disruption scenarios. This helps you to focus on formulating response plans for your most important activities

• Does the template make it clear on what information you need to capture to perform a comprehensive risk assessment.?

• Is the format of template adapted to completing the different activities that need to be completed to develop a professional. compliant business continuity plan.

• Can you see the template before you commit to it?  Can you get a walkthrough that shows you the content of the template and how it helps you to create a sound, effective and compliant business continuity plan?

• Does it show you how to use it? If you are looking for a business continuity plan template to “kick-start” the development of business continuity in your organisation, the chances are that this is a new concept for you. So will a document template on its own be sufficient to drive development forward or might you need some guidance on how to get the best out of the template and how it all fits together. A good template will also be accompanied by a guide in the form of a video or presentation based “explainer” to SHOW you how to use the template.

• Does the template itself demonstrate compliance to the ISO22301? A template that claims it is compliant should be able to show how it is its compliant by containing supporting cross references between its content and the requirements of the ISO 22031 standard, for instance.  This important aspect provides you with the assurance and comfort that your organisation will be using a template that will generate a fully compliant business continuity plan

• Do they help you to “get it right first time”? The development of a business continuity plan goes through several stages.  If business continuity is not your specialism, it’s helpful to have a checklist to ensure that the content at each stage is comprehensive and correct so that you can assess your plan as you develop it.

• Does the template also provide you with a guide to managing the plan going forward? Once a business continuity plan has been created, it must be maintained, regularly reviewed and tested. This requires that a management system must be created to ensure that these tasks are completed so that the plan that you have worked hard to create stays relevant.

Although there are many free business continuity plan templates available many will fail to meet one or more of these requirements.  Here are some of the most common shortcomings:

• They are outdated. Many business continuity plan templates have been sitting on the Internet for years and will be out date

• They may be too simplistic, resulting in a plan that is bland, generic and of little use to you and likely to fail an audit.

• They may be inappropriate for supporting the development of a business continuity plan. A single document template is a prime example of this: the plan will need input from several parts of the organisation to complete different aspects of it. A single document template can prove to be cumbersome and awkward to work with in these situations

Format & Usability Considerations

Does the template provide you all the resources needed to complete the business continuity planning process. It should provide you with all the resources you need to get the job done (without requiring you to upgrade to a premium “toolkit” ). The template should be based on tools that you have in place and which you and you colleagues are already familiar with.  It should also provide you with templates based on the tools most appropriate for the job in hand. That means tools like:

·         Excel for capturing information that will be needed for analysis

·         Word documents for narrative-based content for third party “explainers”

·         Tabular formats for information that will need to be quickly referenced.

·         Presentation formats for any related training content that might be required

So, in other words, will the template you are considering be formatted in line with the intended usage of the information contained in it? This is an area where many templates have significant shortcomings – they are a single file, most likely a Word document, that attempts to capture everything and subsequently compromises the usability of the plan in several areas.  Right at the beginning of this post we mentioned that a good template will help you to protect your organisation from significant, unexpected disruptions and to demonstrate compliance to third parties and external evaluators.  That implies that some information needs to be in a format that can be effectively referenced when required, narrative type information to show management processes and proof of compliance while different formats and tools may be required for capturing information for analytical purposes. Trying to cram and crow-bar all of this in one document will result a business continuity plan that is difficult to main, useless in during a real incident and will probably never be looked at. 

Scenarios

Will the template help you to understand the impacts of different types of impact?  Organisations can find their operations compromised by different types of unexpected disruption and sometimes its not always easy to understand what level of disruption can be experienced and the issues that can arise.  It can feel like you are planning in a vacuum and just guessing at the situations you may need to plan for. Does the template that you are considering give you guidance on the planning considerations that need to be addressed by an organisation in your sector.  Organisations in different industries can have very different industries (supply chains, services, Manufacturing, charity and services organisations will have very different business continuity planning consideration and a good template will provide some guidance on that and on typical recovery times of different types of scenario.

Business Continuity Plan Template Tripwires

There are many pitfalls when trying to select a business continuity plan and, unfortunately, many of the “free” templates out there contain several shortcomings.  We have already identified several tripwires associated with templates that are too generic, too simplistic, outdated, have missing content or are just to cumbersome to work with effectively.  There are however other issues to consider such as why it’s free. Some templates are offered free to get you into a sales funnel for pricier services or just to get contact information to market related services such data recovery or risk management advisory services.  In these situation, little thought has been given as to whether the template will provide a basis for developing an effective or practical business continuity plan – the objective is to acquire your organisation as a “prospect” for other services

Follow this link to see a walkthrough of a business continuity plan template that includes all these features