BCP Supporting Documentation, How much is Too Much?

bcp supporting documentationI get asked by a lot of people when reviewing their departmental business continuity plans, “Do I have enough supporting documents in my plan?” or “How do I know if I have enough supporting documents in my plan?” Usually people will just do a data dump from their intranet site or their mapped drive for their department on a file server. This is not the answer!

The simplest way to determine what to have at a minimum in your supporting document library is look at your business impact analysis.

Steps to take to help determine what you need at a minimum in your supporting documents library.

  1. Ask your IT department when they are planning to recover the intranet or file server (system) that contains your documents during an “all systems down” scenario. They should be able to tell you by looking at their disaster recovery plan and the server priority recovery matrix.
  2. Review your business impact analysis for your department and identify the processes that need to be functional prior to the recovery time given to you by the IT department
  3. For each process identified needing to be functional prior to the recovery of the system you will need the supporting documents

What should the documents provide in value?

  • Support member service in an offline mode
  • Support staff during an offline event
  • Support the recovery process
  • Help to prepare for resumption of online operations

Examples of supporting documents for business processes?

  • Manual (off-line) procedures
  • Policies
  • Forms
  • Checklist(s) or Logs
  • Sanitized (no member data) letters

These documents need to be maintained and updated. Once the intranet or file server is restored you will most likely stop using the documents in your plan and start using them from the restored system that you are more familiar and comfortable with and use on a regular basis.

3 Key Resources for Supporting Your Disaster Recover Strategy

Recovery Objectives or Recovery Actuals – Is there a value we’re avoiding in our BIA’s?

How can I tell if my staff is keeping their business continuity plan up-to-date?

 

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