The term BCM basically stands for Business Continuity Management. According to ISO22301:2012, BCM is defined as the holistic management process that identifies potential threats to organisation and the impacts to business operations those threats of realized, might cause, and which provides a framework for building organisational resilience with the capabilities of an effective response that safeguards the interests of its key stakeholders, reputation, brand, and value-creating activities. In short, BCM is the framework that identifies an organization's risk of exposure to internal and external threats.
There are various frameworks to redefines the business continuity of the business with sets of policies, procedures, and guidelines to implement business continuity. Similarly, the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) has defined the requirement of business continuity management and stages involved in developing, implementing and managing successful business continuity programs based on the ISO Standard. The document is named as Business Continuity Institute's Good Practice Guideline (GPG). This document provides the framework to structure approach to business continuity.
The BCI defines professional practices by establishing general principles, concepts, and assumptions, processes, methods, and techniques and outcomes, and review in each stage of the BCM life cycle. The figure below shows the various stages involved in the BCM lifecycle.
The professional practices have categorized the BCM lifecycle into two categories that aim to build organisation resilience.
Management Practices
PP1 Policy and Programme Management
PP2 Embedding
Technical Practices
PP3 Analysis
PP4 Design
PP5 Implementation
PP6 Validation
This section will cover a brief discussion about each stage of the BCM lifecycle.
PP1 Policy and Programme Management
Establishment of an organisation's policy related to business continuity
Defines the process of implementing policy through an ongoing cycle of activities within a business continuity programme.
Requires support from Top management action, support and commitment to set up.
Draft and review policy relating to business continuity and the programme used to implement.
PP2 Embedding
Defines the plan to integrate business continuity awareness and practice into business as usual activities and organisational culture.
It should be a collaborative approach between management disciplines to improve overall organisational resilience.
PP3 Analysis
Review and assess an organisation to identify its objectives.
Defines its functions and the constraints of its operating environment.
PP4 Design
Identify and select appropriate solutions to determine business continuity in case of any event or incidents
Identify the business continuity requirements.
Determine the solutions that should be implemented to best achieve these requirements.
PP5 Implementation
Implementing the solution determined in the design stage by achieving the business continuity plan to meet the organisation's agreed business continuity requirement and solution identified.
Develop a response structure that defines the necessary roles, authority, and skills required to manage an incident.
To identify and document the priorities, procedures and responsibilities and resources that will support the organsiation when managing an incident.
Achieve continuity of the prioritized activities and ensure recovery of disrupted activities to a pre-defined level of services.
PP6 Validation
Confirms the business continuity programme meet the objectives set in the policy,
Confirms the plans and procedures are in place effective and efficiently.
Ensures the business continuity solutions and response structure reflects the size, complexity, type of organisation.
Ensures the plans are current, accurate, effective and complete.
A continuous improvement plan must be there to improve overall level of organisation resilience.
These are the six stages of BCI professional practices of Business Continuity Management Good Practice Guidelines.
For more details about the BCI: Good Practice Guidelines visit the link below.
Reference:
The Business Continuity Institute. (2018). BCI: Good Practice Guidelines. Berkshire: The Business Continuity Institute.
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