This may involve developing backup systems and processes, identifying alternative suppliers, and establishing procedures for communication and decision-making during a crisis. Maintain focus on running your organization while the Smartsheet Professional Services team partners with you to design processes with long-term stability in mind. Thus ensuring that your solutions are constructed on a stable foundation that keeps work moving. Find peer-to-peer information about everything Smartsheet related – from business continuity best practices to invaluable how-to guidance from fellow users and Smartsheet experts. Use the Office Timeline PowerPoint add-in to quickly customize any of the Gantt chart templates above or create your own.
Business Continuity Plan Template for Healthcare Organizations
- The BDC Business Continuity Guide provides eight steps for building a business continuity plan, including establishing an emergency preparedness team and identifying critical business functions.
- We’ve been able to respond effectively to the COVID-19 Pandemic by using Smartsheet to align our Risk Mitigation framework and best practices to establish a communication and collaboration system strategy.
- A well-defined business continuity strategy isn’t a document that sits on a shelf; it’s a living process.
- It is important to regularly review and update these procedures to ensure they remain effective during a crisis.
States the purpose of the BCP, including specific business functions that should be prioritized for recovery during an emergency. This section should include examples of emergency events that would trigger the response of this BCP. For other most useful free, downloadable business continuity plan (BCP) templates please read our “Free Business business continuity plan template smartsheet Continuity Plan Templates” article. In order to adequately prepare for a crisis, your company needs a business continuity plan. We’ve culled detailed step-by-step instructions, as well as expert tips for writing a business continuity plan and free downloadable tools.
Perform regular audits of your organization’s BCP with a business continuity plan checklist. Whether small or medium business, this checklist can be used to ensure BCPs are up to date and reflect current high-impact operations. Because every company is different, no two approaches to business continuity planning are the same. Tony Bombacino, Co-Founder and President of Real Food Blends, describes his company’s formal and informal business continuity approaches. “The first step in any crisis is for our nerve center to connect quickly, assess the situation, and then go into action,” he explains.
Empower Your Teams to Build Business Continuity with Smartsheet
A comprehensive business continuity strategy should address all potential points of failure, ensuring a holistic approach to crisis management. Think about what truly keeps your business running and prioritize those functions in your planning. Visualizing these critical functions and their interdependencies can help pinpoint vulnerabilities and prioritize recovery efforts.
However, the plan is not a one-time creation; it requires regular maintenance and improvement to remain effective. This section will discuss the importance of reviewing, updating, testing, and exercising a BCP. Smartsheet best practices ensure your solutions remain stable, even within a rapidly changing business environment. I’m a certified BC professional trying to connect with anyone who uses Smartsheet for their BC planning and execution.
Feeling bogged down by repetitive processes and redundant work?
If your continuity plan includes cybersecurity threats, be sure to document breaches using a cybersecurity incident report to support compliance and response tracking. So, ensure a reliable backup plan for essential systems and enable remote access to customer, product, and company data to keep the revenue stream flowing. These plans include guidelines for remote work so employees don’t have to be near the disaster site. They also contain protocols for communicating with one another and evacuating plans in case a disaster happens during work hours.
Expert Disaster Preparation Checklist
- Our platform offers robust tools to help you build, implement, and manage your strategy effectively.
- Testing and exercising a BCP is critical to ensure the plan’s effectiveness and identify improvement areas.
- Use your risk assessment and critical function analysis to brainstorm how your team should react to a business disruption.
- Clarity in leadership, communication channels, and decision-making authority is paramount during a crisis.
Use the following list as a prompt for recording important information about your organization. Full-scale exercises involve a complete simulation of a disruptive event to comprehensively test the plan’s effectiveness. Depending on their needs, organizations can conduct various types of tests, such as tabletop exercises, functional exercises, and full-scale exercises. Empower your people to go above and beyond with a flexible platform designed to match the needs of your team — and adapt as those needs change.
Analyze Potential Risks
Consider using a risk management framework to systematically evaluate potential disruptions and prioritize mitigation efforts. This proactive approach will help you stay ahead of the curve and maintain a relevant and effective BCP, and ClearPoint’s platform can provide the structure and tools to support this ongoing process. Continuity Central offers a variety of business continuity plan templates that cater to different organizational needs. Their templates emphasize the importance of regular testing and updating to ensure that the plans remain effective in the face of evolving threats. This focus on continuous improvement helps organizations maintain a proactive approach to business continuity, ensuring their plans remain relevant and reliable.
This roadmap becomes even more effective when seamlessly woven into your daily operations. A business continuity plan is a living document that should adapt and evolve alongside your business. For a more streamlined approach to integration, consider exploring ClearPoint Strategy’s platform. Jotform provides a user-friendly business continuity plan template that allows organizations to easily create and customize their plans. The template includes sections for risk assessment, communication plans, and recovery strategies, making it a practical tool for businesses looking to enhance their resilience.
Think about the timing for what must occur before, during, and after the business continuity planning process. Just like any strategic initiative, your BCP isn’t a “set it and forget it” document. This can involve anything from informal discussions and walkthroughs to full-scale simulations that mimic real-world disruptions. At ClearPoint, we encourage our clients to conduct regular tests and use the results to identify areas for improvement, much like we do with our own strategic planning process. The plan should also be updated to reflect changes in the business, such as new technologies or locations. New threats also emerge constantly, so regular reviews and revisions are essential to maintaining a relevant and effective BCP.
I will be attending Smartsheet Engage in a couple of weeks and would appreciate meeting up with anyone who is using the software in this manner to share ideas. “I use the image of a three-legged stool,” explains Mike Semel, President and Chief Compliance Officer of Semel Consulting. If you have a policy, then you have to back it up with procedures and back the procedures up with evidence that you’re following them. That’s the hardest and most expensive part.” Learn more about writing procedures and work instructions in our article. Please note that the language you see here may change depending on your answers to the document questionnaire. From here, you can pinpoint high-priority risks that will require immediate attention.
Why Use a BCP Template?
Dynamic reporting features within ClearPoint can help you track these changes and ensure your BCP stays up-to-date. After identifying your key risks, define specific and measurable recovery objectives. These objectives outline the acceptable downtime for each critical business function and the resources required for restoration. For instance, your website recovery objective might be to restore full functionality within 24 hours of an outage. Continuity2 emphasizes the critical role of risk assessment as the foundation of a solid business continuity plan. This underscores the importance of understanding your vulnerabilities before establishing recovery goals.
At ClearPoint, we often use strategy maps with our clients to achieve this clarity. Smartsheet offers free, customizable business continuity plan templates in various formats, including Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and PDF. These templates cover various aspects of business continuity planning, including recovery plans, communication strategies, and risk assessments, making them suitable for businesses of all sizes. The flexibility of these templates allows organizations to tailor their plans to specific needs and resources.
By identifying critical processes, risks, and recovery strategies, the organization can minimize the impact of a disruption on its business and ensure that it can quickly recover from a disaster or emergency. A business continuity plan checklist template is a valuable tool to help businesses develop a comprehensive BCP. It provides a step-by-step guide to help organizations identify potential risks, assess the impact of those risks, and develop a plan to mitigate them. Several organizations offer valuable resources, including templates, guidelines, and software solutions. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) provides frameworks like ISO for business continuity management.
To create an effective business continuity plan, the organization should first identify its critical processes and objectives. These may include key business functions, such as customer service, sales, or production. Similar to the business continuity plan template, this template documents the steps involved in maintaining normal business operations during an unplanned disruption or disaster.
