The case for business continuity plan checklists

Checklists are an often ignored business tool and can enable us to avoid failures and oversights during the life cycle of business continuity plan development. Checklists help us to build on and preserve know-how, taking advantage of the knowledge people have but somehow also making up for our human tendency to forget or overlook.

 

Checklists may seem like a simple concept to apply to complex, unpredictable world but they are shown to work. Good checklists have been shown to work in many settings including venture capital investment, commercial aviation, construction and medicine and are similarly effective in the design, deployment, management and execution of business continuity plans.

 

Primarily a checklist provides a framework to:

• Confirm the scope of business continuity plans during their development

• Provide a guide to performing a complete and comprehensive business continuity plan audit

• Provide an “aide memoir” in highly pressurised environments, preventing tunnel vision and maintaining focus on appropriate actions.

 

By making the key steps explicit and verifiable, a discipline is instilled which can lead to higher levels of performance. Checklists can exist in several different formats – anything from forms where key actions are checked off, to flowcharts providing decision flows, timelines to guide the timing of required actions or matrices to help coordinate several different activities. The way business continuity plan checklists can be put together is unlimited and can be developed and then applied to any and all situations. Some are more appropriate to specific events associated with business continuity (such as business continuity plan development, business continuity plan auditing or managing a major incident) but their overall objective remains the same – to reduce errors and oversight.

So why do checklists work? In a nutshell, checklists ensure people are applying all the knowledge and expertise they have consistently well. Furthermore, checklists start a self-sustaining virtuous cycle. The more checklists get developed, used and refined, the better they become.

 

Where & when should business continuity plan checklists be used?

 

In design & development:  during the design phases of business continuity plans, checklists can help to ensure that that the scope and content of the business continuity plan is comprehensive and will meet the risk management and regulatory needs of the organisation. Developing a business continuity plan is a structured process and checklists will be required to assure the scope and content of each part of the plan. This is particularly important for parts of the plan that relate to establishing scope and operational priorities, communicating with affected parties and actions to be taken when the plan is invoked 

 

To support an audit: an auditor will find a business continuity plan checklist helpful in planning the scope of a business continuity plan audit and to use as assessment criteria for each part of the business continuity plan

 

During invocation: in a complex high-pressure environment associated with the management of response to and recovery from a major incident, incident leadership will inevitably come up against two main difficulties:

• Human memory can become fallible when very serious and pressing events take place.

• Imperfect information, during the initial stages of an incident the scale and rate of contagion are often unclear. A checklist can provide a framework to deal with uncertainty and ensure that appropriate focus is maintained, helping incident responders stay on track and prevent relatively minor distractions taking precedence over priorities

Checklists provide protection against these two key difficulties – particularly in highly pressurised situations. Checklists for use during an incident need to serve the needs of a number of individuals who may be involved in response and recovery. Checklists to support these activities tend to be structured differently than checklists that are used purely for audit and evaluation purposes and for this reason are often based on a business continuity plan template to ensure that the optimum content and structure is used in them.

 

Who should use a business continuity plan checklist?

Anyone who is in the process of developing a business continuity plan or who needs to audit an existing business continuity plan will find a checklist will help them assess the plan scope and content. A checklist will  ensure that the evaluation is comprehensive and thorough.It also pays to use the right tools to develop a business continuity plan - a well structured business continuity plan template will provide the right tools to get the job done

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