Nobody likes a headache, especially a Business Continuity Planning (BCP) headache...
Is your head spinning from trying to get a copy of your plan to everyone that needs it? Are you worried about ensuring that access to sensitive information remains restricted? Dive into this blog post to uncover the secrets to using BCP software solutions to cure all of your BCP headaches. Lucky for you, KingsBridge’s SHIELD software can provide the same relief as Advil!
Access to a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is critical when disaster strikes. To ensure this, many companies periodically print and distribute their plans to their recovery team members. A wide plan distribution is great to make sure everyone has the information they need. The risk, however, is when old copies of the plans remain in circulation.
Web-based software solutions eliminate the risk of old, stale copies floating around while ensuring users have access to the latest, most current information. In SHIELD, all changes are immediately reflected in the plan, allowing users with access to view them right away. No need to print and distribute.
Hosting your BCP electronically makes editing and distribution a breeze! But what happens if your server room is destroyed during a disaster? How will you access your plan if you can’t get to an internet connection?
iOS and Android mobile apps like SHIELD Mobile allow you to download a local copy of your plan to your mobile device. Even if you don’t have an internet connection or cell service, your plan and any attached documents are easily accessible. Now you can get your business back up and running, perhaps by starting with restoring your internet connection!
In principle, sharing your BCP widely to ensure everyone has access to it is great. The challenge comes when there is sensitive information in the plan that some people just shouldn’t see. Paper documents with sensitive information in them are a major security risk. There is an even greater risk when documents are stored in the trunk of a manager’s vehicle or a home filing cabinet.
Choosing to host your BCP electronically allows you to select exactly which team members should see what. With SHIELD’s team-based permissions, you can grant access to only the parts of the plan that are relevant to a specific team/user. For example, your Facilities Team doesn’t need to see the payroll, and your Sales Team doesn’t need access to your Board of Directors’ contact information
Although restricted access is great for your recovery teams, there are always a handful of people that want or need to see EVERYTHING. Senior management may need to see the whole plan to sign off on the content. You may also have auditors that need to see the whole plan to verify that you’re meeting their requirements.
With BCP software, you can provide auditors and senior management with a full view of your plan without the concern that they will change something they shouldn’t. For example, SHIELD offers Auditor access, enabling users to view all content in the plan without permitting any edits. Additionally, Administrator access provides select users with full access to read, edit, and manage permissions within the plan.
Starting BCP can seem like a daunting task; knowing where to begin can be the hardest part. Often senior management assigns plan development to an employee with no experience or resources to complete the job.
At KingsBridge, we want to take that first step for you. Our SHIELD software comes with hundreds of pages of content templates for every type of recovery team you can imagine. We also have specialized templates for credit unions or for those who want to follow the FEMA format. From recommendations on getting started to tips for exercising your completed plan, SHIELD doesn’t just house your plan, it writes a lot of it for you!
We recognize that Business Continuity might not be the number one priority of everyone in your organization. You orient staff to the software but then they never touch it again. As a result, when users log in, it’s like a whole new experience, every time.
To help re-orient our infrequent users, our BCP Wizard will walk them through the core components of SHIELD. The first time they log in, the Wizard will be front and center, prompting them to take a guided tour of the software. After this initial walk-through, the Wizard tutorials can still be easily accessed whenever a refresher is needed.
The more comprehensive your BCP becomes the more material it includes. This can make it daunting for users to find the reference documents or procedures they need to complete a particular step in their recovery. At KingsBridge, we perform gap analyses on BCPs, so we’re all too familiar with giant appendices. Just finding the information you need in a pile of documents you don’t use every day can be a challenge.
To solve this problem, we implemented a simple and secure navigation solution in SHIELD: hyperlinks. You can create a hyperlink from any group of words directly to a document, report, section, or website. A user simply clicks the hyperlink and they are directed to the target. No more flipping through appendices!
Being able to communicate quickly and efficiently with all staff is critical to smoothly mitigating and/or recovering from an incident. There are many mass notification tools on the market, but they often have so many bells and whistles that getting comfortable with using them is a hurdle. Sending an urgent notification to all staff is not something that happens on a regular basis–at least you hope not–so it’s important that the tool you choose is intuitive and easy to use.
Following our Simple & Secure BCP philosophy, we decided to build an easy-to-use notification tool (SHIELD Communications) right into our software. There is no need to train your users on yet another application or maintain a separate database of contact information. Once a user with notification permissions logs into SHIELD, simple and secure notifications are at their fingertips.
Keeping contact information up-to-date is one of the most challenging yet most important parts of a reliable BCP. Just keeping personnel information current is challenging enough, but what about all those vendors you need to be able to reach out to if disaster strikes?
Trying to update information in more than one place is unreliable and only makes for extra work. In SHIELD, you can skip the extra work and import information directly from other data sources. With an extract from your HR database or your vendor management system, our software is equipped with import and merge functions that allow you to pull new information in with just a few clicks. No more editing row after row. Simply choose your method of importing, and SHIELD does the rest!
Global changes to your BCP can be a nightmare. Whether it’s a company name change, a new address, or a major software update, there can be a lot of reasons to make significant changes to your plan. Sure, “Find and Replace” can work for some things but then you have to redo the table of contents, create new PDF copies, and redistribute the plan…again.
With SHIELD, global changes are easy with the Plan Markup table. This table is home to the frequently used terms and phrases throughout your BCP. For example, your company name or address. If any of these terms or phrases change, simply updating the item in the Plan Markup table will automatically change it throughout your plan. Think of it like "Find and Replace" on steroids.
BCPs are one of those things that impact every part of an organization. As a result, there is a lot of communication that needs to take place between you, the plan owner, and all of the other departments that contribute and review the plan content. With so many people involved, it can be a challenge to track who has done what.
Software tools can make it easier to assign and manage tasks. SHIELD has a built-in management tool that allows you to assign tasks to plan contributors and gives you a dashboard view of who has and has not completed their assignments. Contributors can be automatically emailed to let them know when a task has been assigned to them, and you will receive an email when the task has been completed and is ready for your review.
Having a BCP has become a common requirement for many businesses, which means it often needs a review once complete. One risk to using an online tool is the challenge in sharing that web-based content with someone who is outside of your organization. How do you share your completed plan without sharing sensitive information?
The answer is custom publishing. The content in SHIELD is structured as a series of sections and subsections. With custom publishing, you just select the sections you want to include in a published copy of your plan. Once you click ‘Publish’, a PDF of that content is automatically created, complete with a cover page and table of contents. Each publication can be different than the one before so you can have a PDF copy of your plan to meet any need.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this post on how you can address your BCP headaches!
KingsBridgeBCP offers businesses of all sizes BCP Software Solutions and industry know how based on best practices. From our SHIELD - Free to our SHIELD - Platinum, there is a SHIELD for everyone. Our software packages meet the wide range of our customers’ needs, ensuring we deliver the best value in every project. Find out more about KingsBridge. BCP software isn't going to address your needs? Check out our BCP Services as we've got a service for almost every BCP need.
