7 tips for developing

business continuity
plans that work
Contents
INTRODUCTION:
WHY YOU NEED A BUSINESS CONTINUITY (BC) PLAN . . . . . . . . . . 3-4

The case for flexibility in business continuity planning . . . . . . . . 5

7 BEST PRACTICES FOR CREATING A BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN . . 6

Establish your crisis management team . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Define critical business processes to determine

where to focus your BC efforts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7-8

Map out your core business processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Identify your most likely business risks and include

controls in your processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Communicate the plan with stakeholders and get buy-in . . . . . . 10

Regularly practice the plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Continually update the plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

CHALLENGES IN MANAGING BUSINESS PROCESSES

TO SUPPORT A BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY IN BUSINESS CONTINUITY . . . . . . . . 13

Process management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Process automation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Process optimization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

PREPARE NOW FOR THE FUTURE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

ABOUT NINTEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18

Why you need a
business continuity
(BC) plan
Keeping your business up and running during a crisis,
such as the COVID-19 pandemic, requires a business
continuity (BC) plan. Business continuity plans identify
the business processes that are essential to keeping your
business operating and providing value while delivering
a blueprint for your response.

Yet today, many organizations lack advanced planning.

Mercer’s “Business Responses to the Covid-19 Outbreak
Survey1” found that 51% of organizations have no
business continuity plan. Even fewer organizations
were ready for the COVID-19 pandemic. Gartner2 found
that just 12% of respondents to a recent survey believe
their businesses were highly prepared for the effects
of the coronavirus. Similarly, a McKinsey study that
looked at 1,000 companies found that 10 percent of
these companies fared significantly better than the rest
because they were prepared.3

1
https://solutionsreview.com/backup-disaster-recovery/51-of-organizations-have-no-business-continuity-plan-to-combat-coronavirus/
2
https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-03-10-gartner-business-continuity-survey-shows-just-twelve-percernt-of-organizations-are-highly-prepared-for-coronavirsu
3
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/bubbles-pop-downturns-stop

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The negative business impact of this lack of preparation has
Businesses feel pandemic
been astronomical. A Management Trends4 study found that 93% will harm their business
93% of businesses feel the pandemic will harm their business
and 86% expected revenue to decline significantly due to the
outbreak.
Businesses expecting
86%
Luckily, businesses are waking up to the need for better revenue to decline
planning for future phases of the pandemic. Fifty one percent
of respondents to the Management Trends survey are now
focusing on business continuity planning to manage potential
threats from a second or third wave of coronavirus.

This eBook is designed to help you plan for the next phases of Businesses who are now
the current pandemic. The same principles can apply to any
51% focusing on business
continuity planning
unforeseen crises that may arise in the future. It will explore:

WHY YOU NEED BEST PRACTICES WHY ORGANIZATIONS THE ROLE OF

FLEXIBILITY IN FOR DEVELOPING TODAY ARE CHALLENGED TECHNOLOGY
BUSINESS CONTINUITY AN AGILE BUSINESS TO MANAGE THE PROCESSES IN BUSINESS
PLANNING CONTINUITY PLAN THAT SUPPORT THEIR PLAN CONTINUITY

4
https://managementevents.com/news/the-impact-of-covid-19-on-businesses/

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The case for flexibility in business continuity planning
Not only does the coronavirus pandemic highlight the need for business continuity planning in general, it
underscores the need to have plans that can respond with agility to new conditions. While most business continuity
plans address events that have happened historically, with the current pandemic, businesses have encountered
“unknown unknowns” that most never imagined. These include:

REMOTE WORK CUSTOMER BC ISSUES STAFF SHORTAGES

Most organizations had not considered the need for widespread Most business continuity Many organizations have
remote work. A study by AvidXchange found that only 37% of planning is internally fewer workers due to illness,
organizations with a business continuity plan have the necessary focused. It prepares quarantine or layoffs due
technology to enable employees to work from home as part of organizations to maintain to the current economic
their strategy . Organizations are challenged to ensure:
5
their own operations. downturn. They need to
The COVID-19 crisis is find new ways to cross
• Enough laptops and VPN lines unprecedented in that train employee on the fly
many organizations to perform new tasks when
• Adequate cybersecurity for remote workers, including
and their customers are workers can’t go down the
secure endpoints, two-factor authentication, user credential
experiencing disruptions hall for instruction from a
management, and secure decommissioning of workers who
simultaneously. colleague or manager.
leave the company while ensuring managers have continued
Organizations need to
access to their data
find ways to keep serving
• Effective communications channels, including collaboration customers under these new
and teleconferencing conditions.

• Remote worker productivity

5
http://automate.avidxchange.com/rs/598-WVB-246/images/Critical_Gaps_in_Business_Continuity_Plan.pdf

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7
best practices
for creating
a business
continuity plan
Setting up a business continuity plan that can address
both well understood and unforeseen crises requires
thoughtful and thorough planning. The following are
best practices for implementing such an agile business
continuity plan.

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1. Establish your crisis 2. Define critical business processes to
management team determine where to focus your BC efforts

Identify and assemble the key people Every organization relies on processes to produce goods or services and
in your organization who should be maintain internal operations. To ensure business continuity, you need to define
involved in business continuity planning which of your processes are essential to your continued viability as a business
and crisis management. In addition to and prioritize their continued operation in your plan. For example, invoicing
IT, this team should include risk owners, processes may be essential but those for ordering business cards are not.
business continuity plan owners and
process owners who are subject matter Be sure to consider both internal processes, such as IT, payroll, and HR, and
experts within critical departments and external processes used to deliver value to and interact with customers.
lines of business in your organization.
The crisis management team imbues Defining these core processes requires two types of analysis: Formal business
your planning effort with a strong impact analysis (BIA) and informal analysis. The BIA analysis process is
understanding of the business by designed to identify core processes as well as the resources, SLAs, and
lending relevant perspective across their equipment you’ll need to perform them efficiently. Many templates are
areas of expertise. available from software vendors or consultants to simplify the formal BIA
process.

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But a formalized process won’t surface all of the most important core processes
and resources for your business on its own. You must supplement templates with
the deep subject matter expertise of your crisis management team. For example,
including core members of your sales operations team in the business continuity
planning process helps the crisis management team understand what your sales
team needs to accomplish from an operational perspective. These SMEs can also
create on-the-fly solutions to maintain critical operations.

The objective of this business process identification is to:

IDENTIFY your key DEFINE the worst-case UNDERSTAND your PRIORITIZE processes
business functions and scenario for your business recovery time objectives/ that support your
the level of impact not irrespective of the situation recovery point objectives company’s key goals and
having these functions and prioritize what must go (RTO/RPO). objectives.
would have on the back into place and in
business. what order.

RPO specifies how much data you can afford to lose during network
downtime. RTO designates the amount of time that can pass before an
event seriously disrupts the normal flow of business operations.

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 HOW TO
ENSURE YOUR
3. Map out your core
EMPLOYEES
business processes STAY ENGAGED
Next, you should document your critical While business continuity plans usually focus on processes
business process. Process mapping enables and supporting technology needed to get your critical
you to clearly see the required steps, business processes back up and running, it’s also important
handoffs, accompanying documents, as to consider the human factor. Your employees are critical to
well necessary hardware and software the way your company runs and how business processes are
required to complete them. Business shaped.
process mapping should also take
Your plans should consider the fact that employees face unique
into account appropriate standards,
emotional challenges in working from home totally separated from
regulations, legislation and best practices.
customers and co-workers. It’s important to prioritize ways to ensure
This documentation will make it easier for
that workers feel supported and connected in a remote environment.
employees to continue functioning if they
For example, you may want to leverage online collaboration tools like
are forced to change the way they perform
Zoom and Microsoft Teams to enable people to virtually see each
a given process in the wake of a crisis, or
other and share experiences and tips about working from home.
if employees must quickly learn a new
process to fill in for sick, quarantined or
laid-off workers.

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4. Identify your most likely
business risks and include
controls in your processes

Planning your response to some of your most

likely crisis situations in advance will help you 5. Communicate the
streamline these efforts during a time of crisis. plan with stakeholders
This means it’s important to identify your most
likely risks including natural disasters, such as
and get buy-in
fires, tornados, floods and earthquakes, as well
as key organizational and regulatory risks, such Once you’ve developed your business continuity
as anything associated with SOC compliance or plan, secure buy-in from the top down and
ISO certification. As you map out your processes, across the organization to improve awareness
include controls to mitigate these risks. as well as establish the plan’s relevance
and importance. During a crisis, it’s vital to
communicate with your board and executives
to make them aware of your progress toward
achieving your RTO/RPO goals.

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 7. Continually
6. Regularly practice update the plan
the plan
Business continuity planning is a
process that never ends. Your plan
To ensure your business continuity plan operates
must be continually reviewed and
correctly, perform trial runs on a regular (quarterly
modified as conditions evolve. Take
or annual) basis. Go through each contingency
an iterative approach to revising
plan you developed for each critical business
your plan on an ongoing basis
process to make sure your employees can follow
to keep it up-to-date and able to
the plan correctly and that your plan is effective.
respond to changing requirements.
For example, if critical desktop hardware must
operate consistently, pull the spare devices you
have on hand and test them regularly to be
confident everything is working. Such testing
ensures that if there is a problem with the primary
hardware, you can resolve it quickly.

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Challenges in managing business
processes to support a BC plan
Mapping business processes
1. The considerable time and
4. Communicating plans that exist in hard
is a key part of your business effort necessary to build, copy to the people who need them,
document, test and revise when they need them, with the most
continuity strategy. Yet
processes and business up-to-date information, especially
organizations face numerous continuity controls. when workforces go remote.
challenges when creating this
documentation and ensuring it
gets into the right hands when
2. The inability of plans to incorporate
5. The fact that fallible humans must
every possible crisis that can arise. follow the processes and procedures
needed. These include: At the same time, if an organization in the BC plan. Organizations need to
attempts to be comprehensive, the ensure that workers are clear on the
plan can quickly become unwieldy. steps they need to execute, as well as
how and when to escalate decision
making in the process.

3. Process documentation and

6. Lack of updates to BC plans on a
updating. Often, business continuity regular cadence, which potentially
plans exist on a company intranet, leaves plans so out of date people
or even in binders that sit in won’t follow them. It can be
someone’s office, which makes difficult to remember to update
them difficult to follow and quickly the documents and do testing on a
out of date. quarterly or annual basis.

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The role of
technology in
business continuity
Digital process management and automation software is designed to help improve the way
people work. It makes it easier for organizations to map out their critical business processes,
identify and manage organizational risks, revise processes as necessary, communicate
processes to those who must implement them, automate manual processes, as well as
optimize and revise processes as necessary. You can improve your business continuity
execution by standardizing on a technology platform that provides easy-to-use tools for
visual process management and for rapidly automating processes.

PROCESS PROCESS PROCESS

MANAGEMENT AUTOMATION OPTIMIZATION

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Process management
A digital process management solution When an unexpected crisis occurs,
enables you to collaborate with stakeholders organizations may need to rapidly change
to identify processes that are critical their business continuity processes to
for business continuity. Once you’ve address unforeseen conditions. Your
determined your most critical internal organization can assign control measures
and external processes, you can then use to specific personnel who can take
the tool to define and map the requisite responsibility for maintaining an up-
steps, handoffs, stakeholders, SLAs, and to-date plan. Visual business process
technologies in an easy-to-understand mapping capabilities make it easy for these
and accessible format. This mapping can personnel to redefine how core process
also include control measures to mitigate steps should be performed in response to
identified risks to those processes. changing conditions. For example, say your
organization normally approves and pays
This detailed process documentation vendor invoices by getting wet signatures
describes up-to-date processes and is from a manager on a piece of paper and
available anytime, anywhere-- not stored having accounts payable cut a physical
in a binder, locked away in an office. Your check. With process mapping software, you
organization can now give frontline process could easily map out a new process that
workers the instructions they need to be captures electronic signatures and makes
successful, even if the business continuity payments online.
plan requires them to perform process steps
from a remote location and/or in different Digital process automation also handles all
ways or using different technologies than communications to risk owners, process
they would normally. Documented process owners, business continuity plan managers
maps also make it easier to cross train regarding changes to any process controls.
workers when fewer workers are available Now you can get process updates into the
due to sickness, quarantines or layoffs. hands of the stakeholders who need them
quickly and easily.

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Process automation
When companies are forced to downsize headcount to
save costs during a crisis, manual, inefficient processes
can cripple their ability to survive. Automation enables
you to do the same amount of work with fewer
resources. As a result, a business continuity plan should
include automating critical processes.

Not only should you map out the vital processes that
comprise your business continuity plan, you can also
streamline these processes with automation and
improve their efficiency. Once a process is mapped
out, business process automation tools enable you to
identify areas that could be automated. You can put in
time estimates for each step to prioritize where to apply
automation in the process to maximize efficiency. This
allows you to take the most time-consuming manual
processes and reduce the human touch so fewer people
can handle the same volume of requests.

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Process optimization
A business continuity plan is a living document. It needs to be continually
revised based on changing business conditions, or on post-mortems with
process participants. Digital process management and automation tools
help your organization optimize business processes based on feedback from
analytics and from your employees.

These tools incorporate data analytics technology to monitor automated

workflows and report back on specific points of failure or areas that can be
streamlined to maximize process efficiency. For example, if the workflow
requires an approval step, it might route a document to a manager’s desk
for approval. If data analytics reveals that nine times out of 10, this approval
step takes two-to-three days longer than it should, you could then build an
escalation into the workflow such that if the document sits in the manager’s
queue for 12 hours, it is escalated to someone else for review.

In addition, a key part of regular process management is constantly looking at

the outputs of the process and evaluating whether it is performing as required.
A digital process management tool enables you to build feedback components
into every process to permit people to provide insights into improvement
opportunities they see in the process on an ongoing basis.

After an event, you can also perform a more formalized postmortem process
using these tools. People can gather around and look at standard processes
that were part of the business continuity plan and evaluate how they performed
and then earmark processes for change.

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Prepare now for
the future
Keeping your business processes operating in times
of crisis takes a business continuity plan--and in the
wake of an unexpected crisis, such as the coronavirus
pandemic, the ability to quickly adjust that plan to
new conditions on the fly while keeping stakeholders
informed.

Digital process management and automation software

makes it easier to create your business continuity plan,
share it and keep it up to date. It also gives you the
additional benefits of greater automation to streamline
your processes so that you can operate with fewer
employees and the ability to continually optimize
your plan based on data and user feedback.

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ABOUT NINTEX

Nintex is the global standard for process management and automation. Today more than 10,000 public
and private sector organizations across 90 countries turn to the Nintex Platform to accelerate progress
on their digital transformation journeys by quickly and easily managing, automating, and optimizing
business processes. Learn more by visiting www.nintex.com and experience how Nintex and its global
partner network are shaping the future of Intelligent Process Automation (IPA).