M61InstitutionaliseInstitutionalisation· Module 5
Business Continuity
One outage, one departure or one lost laptop would stop the business. No one has planned for it.
- Institutionalise
- Manage
- Governance
- Operations
- Technology
- ~5 min · Template
The business problem
Small businesses are often one incident away from disruption: a key person unavailable, a system down, data lost, a supplier failure, a fire. Without a continuity plan, recovery is improvised and slow.
Why it matters
Continuity planning protects revenue, customers and reputation. It also forces the business to document critical knowledge and back up critical data — valuable in its own right.
What you will learn
- Identify critical processes and their dependencies
- Assess the impact of disruption over time
- Plan backups, alternatives and recovery steps
- Test the plan
Core questions
- Which processes must keep running, and for how long can they stop?
- What people, systems, data and suppliers do they depend on?
- Is our data backed up and recoverable?
- Who does what if a key person is unavailable?
Work through the module
CaseWhat is happening?
Clinic group, 3 sites · Illustrative teaching case
A clinic group's patient records sit on one server in the main clinic. A power surge damages the server and the clinics work on paper for a week. The group moves records to a backed-up system, documents a manual fallback, cross-trains staff on critical tasks and tests recovery twice a year.
DecisionWhat does the leader need to decide?
Accept the risk as unlikely, or invest in continuity for critical processes?
FrameworkHow should they think about the problem?
Business impact analysis
For each critical process, estimate the impact of disruption over hours, days and weeks. Identify dependencies. Set the maximum tolerable downtime and plan recovery to meet it.
ToolWhat can they use?
Continuity planTemplate
- Critical processes and maximum downtime
- Dependencies: people, systems, data, suppliers
- Backup and fallback for each
- Recovery steps and owners
- Test schedule
ApplicationHow does it apply to their business?
Apply it to your own business:
- List your five most critical processes
- Identify their single points of failure
- Check that data backups exist and can be restored
ImplementationWhat changes?
What should change in the business:
- Put backups and cross-training in place
- Document recovery steps
- Test at least annually
ReviewDid it work?
How to tell whether the change worked:
- Did the last test meet the recovery target?
- Have single points of failure reduced?
- Did any incident recover faster because of the plan?
After this module you should be able to decide
Accept the risk as unlikely, or invest in continuity for critical processes?
And leave with: A continuity plan for your most critical processes.
Sequence · Institutionalisation