Business Continuity For Dummies

Understanding What Matters Most

Your key products and services are the ones that are truly essential to your business’s survival. Even if a disruption stops you performing in some sectors, these areas are the ones that you need to prioritise and can’t allow to fail. These products or services are supported by a number of activities, and we call the most important and time-critical of these your critical activities. Without them you have no product or service to offer, and in due course, perhaps no business.

Identifying your key products and services and associated critical activities is about deciding what’s in and what’s out (of scope). In general, small or medium businesses focus solely on what they need to do to achieve their goals anyway, and if this sounds like you, you’re already halfway towards having a BIA.

The initial stage in the process is to write down a list of all the products and services that your business produces or delivers. (We assume that your aim is to make a profit by selling products or providing a service, or if you’re a charity or not-for-profit firm that you aim to do what you do for the best value.)

The next step is to decide on the relative importance of the products and services by thinking about what would happen if you weren’t able to produce all your usual outputs. How would your customers deal with this situation and how long would you take to get ...