BCI offers useful guidance

The Business Continuity Institute offers free documents online to help practitioners implement effective business continuity plans.

The first version of the group’s 76-page Good Practice Guidelines was originally prepared in 2002 by a working group with many business continuity plan (BCP) experts; it was then rewritten to take into account numerous comments, new public standards and new legislation affecting BCP.

The guidelines include an overview and introduction that can be helpful in communicating the need and nature of BCP to non-technical managers. Using British spelling, it starts with:

The Business Continuity Management Programme:

* Organisation (Corporate) BCM Strategy and BCM Policy

* Business Continuity Management

* Incident Readiness and Response

It then defines the Business Continuity Management Life Cycle as follows:

Stage No. 1: Understanding Your Business:

* Organisational Strategy

* Business Impact Analysis

* Risk Assessment and Control

Stage No. 2: Business Continuity Management Strategies:

* Organisation (Corporate) BCM Strategy

* Process Level BCM Strategy

* Resource Recovery BCM Strategy

Stage No. 3: Developing and Implementing a BCM Response

* Crisis Management, Public Relations and the Media

* Business Continuity Plans

* Business Unit Plans, Incident Response

Stage No. 4: Developing a Business Continuity Management Culture

* Assessing

* Designing and delivering

* Measuring results

Stage No. 5: Exercising, Maintenance and Audit

* Exercising of BCM plans

* BCM Maintenance

* BCM Audit

And then one circles back to Stage 1 for continuous process improvement.

The Guidelines provide lots of material that can be applied directly to one’s BCP; it is so well structured and succinct that it could easily be used to create teaching slides.

Another page I find valuable is the list of pointers to recent papers from the BCI journal _Continuity_. Some of the titles that caught my eye on that page include:

* Business continuity on a limited budget

* Prepare for the worst – Guidelines for BC Management

* Avian Flu: What does it mean to business continuity?

* How much do you really know about off site recovery?

* Implications of a colder than average winter

I hope that practitioners and educators will find these resources helpful.