Business Continuity Planning: a step-by-step guide

How to write a business continuity plan

1. 1
   Map your organisation

   List departments, people, critical processes and the assets and vendors each process depends on. This is the data backbone every later step builds on.

2. 2
   Run a Business Impact Analysis

   Score each process's impact over time and derive its RTO, RPO and MTPD. Rank processes into criticality tiers so you plan for the most critical first.

3. 3
   Assess risk

   Identify threats to your critical processes, score them by likelihood and impact on a 5×5 matrix, and decide which to treat.

4. 4
   Choose recovery strategies and write the plan

   For each critical process, choose a recovery strategy and document activation criteria, roles, call trees, ordered recovery procedures with time targets, resources and communications.

5. 5
   Approve and version the plan

   Submit for review and approve it. Freeze an immutable, versioned snapshot, resolve live contacts with a 'data as of' stamp, and set a review-due date.

6. 6
   Exercise and improve

   Run a tabletop within 90 days, capture findings as corrective actions, and feed lessons back into the plan.

Frequently asked questions

What are the steps of business continuity planning?

Map the organisation, run a business impact analysis, assess risk, choose recovery strategies and write the plan, approve and version it, then exercise and improve. Each step produces an output that feeds the next.

How long does it take to write a business continuity plan?

With structured tooling, a first approved plan for one critical process can take under an hour; a full program scoped across an organisation typically takes weeks, not the six-plus months of a traditional consulting engagement.