Business Continuity Plans in Engage Process

https://youtu.be/jqeYjxhjktg https://events.weareleanandagile.com/e/creating-business-continuity-pla Whether you are a customer or considering using Engage Process have a look at this blog on how you can utilise the power of the Engage Process Suite to capture, share, improve, iterate and collaborate on your Business Continuity Plans. You can get all the benefits of the software you already use for business processes with your business continuity plans too. Have a look at them here Create digital business continuity plans that are easy to use and maintain. No more long word documents for your business continuity plans. Make your business continuity plans easier to use.

How to create your Business Continuity Plans in Engage Process

What are Business Continuity Plans or Planning?

From Wikipedia – Business continuity planning (or business continuity and resiliency planning) is the process of creating systems of prevention and recovery to deal with potential threats to a company. In addition to prevention, the goal is to enable ongoing operations before and during execution of disaster recovery.   An organization’s resistance to failure is “the ability … to withstand changes in its environment and still function”. Often called resilience, it is a capability that enables organizations to either endure environmental changes without having to permanently adapt, or the organization is forced to adapt a new way of working that better suits the new environmental conditions.

Why is a Business Continuity Plan important right now?

Every organisation has recently had to test their business continuity plans capabilities (and potentially their disaster recovery plans) during the global pandemic (whether they had one or not!). Now is a great time to be revising your business continuity plans given the recent experience and the likelihood of having to enact them in the short term. All organisations were in different states of readiness to handle the current crisis and undoubtedly all will have also identified ideas for improvement or challenges with the current processes. The business continuity plan cycle shares a huge amount of commonality with a continuous improvement cycle. Likewise, the business continuity plan is very similar to an organisations process handbook and has a lot of common user needs between the two. Both are critical foundations in a successful organisation and help support and organisations agility, ability to change and resilience.

What are the challenges of Business Continuity Plans?

 There are a huge amount of complex purpose, process, and people information to be stored and regularly reviewed and updated. A Business Continuity Plan is a living document that needs to be continuously iterated. To be effective the information will need to be easy to understand and easy to access at a moment’s notice. To complete a business continuity plan you need to engage people from across the organization. It needs to be easy to update and it needs to contain all the information the organization will require to implement the plans. You may need to change these processes rapidly and potentially whilst working in a remote way. To do this you need to be able to collaborate digitally on those processes. You also need to understand the impacts of any changes both in terms of times and costs. As with traditional process mapping, using paper and other mediums to capture and document your processes, there is a challenge that this process is both time-consuming, wasteful and requires high levels of skill as well as some sort of standards as to how the information is to be captured. With this traditional approach can be difficult to quickly access the information you need. Information can be contained in many sources and the format it is stored in e.g. Word or other writing tools does not lend itself to ease of use or access. With the current COVID-19 crisis clearly, we are going to need to change our Business Continuity Plans many times over the next few months sometimes at very short notice. More than ever our business continuity plans need to be efficient and effective documents as they are being tested like never before. Following the recent live test of our plans, there are undoubtedly going to be things that worked really well, things that didn’t quite work and need some improvement and things that just didn’t work and they need to be redesigned. For all of these reasons, there is a lot of work needed on organizations business continuity plans.

If there was a better way to deliver your BCP surely you would do it?

If you are already using Engage Process then you already have the capability to do this so read on and we will explain the elements we would use. If you are not yet using Engage Process you have even more to benefit from by reading on, you have the potential benefit of applying Engage to both your normal processes and your business continuity plans.

How we can help with your BCPs?

We are experts in helping people with Continuous Improvement. In order to ratify our thinking about the Business Continuity Planning Cycle and how Engage Process can help you deliver it we leaned heavily on a number of articles with these 2 the most referenced were this and this. We have used this to validate the requirements for effective Business Continuity Planning. We understand the benefits of continuous improvement and are experienced in helping our customers to achieve them. We apply that same thinking to your business continuity plans.

Go on then how do I do it in Engage Process?

We will be utilising the functionality we would use to set up a standard digital process handbook. Some of the design and data collected will be different to service seven slightly different user needs. The main parts we will be using for Business Continuity Plans will be:

• Modeller
• Settings
• Icons
• Tables
• Roles
• Publisher
• Viewer
• Teamboard
• Dashboard

By using these modules, you will be able to:

• Create your digital Business Continuity Plan
• Deliver an easy to use and navigate knowledge base
• Map and model your processes rapidly
• Map and model processes remotely
• Make it accessible to all
• Control access and permissions
• Be able to manage activities in the programme
• Collaborate with all stakeholders
• Get feedback on the plan
• Have a single source of information

Join our Business Continuity Plan in Engage Process Online Event

An interactive event is are far better way to demonstrate how to use Engage Process for your BCP. Join the event to take part live or access the video on demand after the event. If any customers would like to take part in this webinar (present experience of business continuity mapping) please do get in touch it always adds value where real users add their perspective.

Added value

Many of you will already be aware of the benefits of Engage Process in Continuous Improvement. The aim of this article and event is to help you get more value out of the software and the capabilities. Business continuity plans share many common user needs with the Continuous Improvement cycle that Engage Process supports. A business continuity plan is a critical document at any point but right now its importance is even greater take advantage of the benefits of Engage if you’re not using it for your organization’s plans now is a good time to start. The value and importance of your business continuity plan and your ability to iterate it mean, there are huge benefits to being able to do it far more efficiently and effectively. We would always advocate having all of your processes mapped across your organization at any point in time and right now it would stand you in very good stead to cope with the current crisis. Being able to quickly and easily iterate your processes is a vital task for any organization hoping to succeed and thrive.

Is your Business Continuity Plan fit for purpose?

Did your business continuity plan work for you? Is there a potential for improvement? Why not join our online event and see how you could make a more effective and efficient way to deliver your plans and get more value from your existing or future investment in Engage Process?