Let’s continue with business continuity. Today I would like to review some points to be taken into account during the implementation of a Business Continuity Plan, which I consider essential to achieve a successful outcome:

1. The scope.

2. Senior management support

3. Investment

4. Setting the objective recovery times.

And with this extremely short introduction, let’s go into the matter.

1. The scope

The first aspect that we must take into account is the scope of our Business Continuity Plan (BCP), in two different areas. On the one hand, in an horizontal sense, it is necessary to clearly define which services, activities or processes are going to be included in the BCP, if we also intend to certify the management system in ISO 22301 standard. Although from a BCP’s usefulness point of view the most logical thing is to include the entire organization, especially in small companies where the infrastructure is shared for all the organization, it is also possible to choose a reduced scope that covers relatively independent elements (a local branch or the company’s headquarters, for example), or simply include those processes that are known beforehand to be the most critical for the organization’s continuity, such as production or logistics in a more industrial company, or the web portal in a purely e-commerce company.