Public Safety Canada, an agency created in 2003 to ensure coordination among all federal departments and agencies responsible for national security, has published a useful guide to business continuity planning at www.publicsafety.gc.ca/prg/em/gds/bcp-en.asp.You should obviously customize your company’s business continuity plan to reflect its particular industry and operations. But, as a starting point, you should ensure that your company’s plan has at least the five sections recommended by Public Safety Canada’s guide:

1. Governance Structure

Someone in the company needs to create, implement and oversee the business continuity plan. Typically, these tasks are done by a senior management committee. The plan should define the committee’s roles and responsibilities and spell out who the members of the committee are.

2. Business Impact Analysis

The purpose of a business impact analysis is to:

• Identify the company’s mandate and critical services or products;
• Identify impacts of disruptions to operations, such as how long the organization could function without a service or product and how long customers would accept the unavailability of that service or product;
• Identify areas of potential revenue loss, additional expenses and intangible losses that a disruption to operations might cause;
• Spell out insurance requirements and coverage;
• Rank the critical services or products based on potential loss of revenue, time of recovery and severity of impact a disruption would cause; and
• Identify “dependencies”—that is, those services or products that are dependent on the delivery of other services or products.

3. Steps, Measures and Arrangements

This section is the meat and potatoes of the plan—that is, the actual steps to be taken to ensure that the company’s business continues after a safety incident. The company should establish teams to implement these steps and lead recovery and response operations.

The plan should initially try to mitigate the disruption of the company’s business, such as by having stand-by generators available in case, say, a worker on a crane inadvertently takes down a power line, cutting electricity to the facility. If mitigation isn’t possible or sufficient, the plan should address the steps necessary to respond to events as they unfold. These steps should anticipate increasing levels of disruption. For example, if a safety incident causes a pipe to burst and flood the facility, the initial step could be to move work to another floor of the facility or to another section of the facility. If the flooding proves more extensive than initially believed, work may need to be moved to another building or facility in an entirely different location. So the plan should address the availability of other facilities.

4. Readiness Procedures

A business continuity plan can only be implemented smoothly and effectively if:

• All workers and staff are familiar with the plan and aware of their individual responsibilities under it; and
• Workers on teams responsible for implementing the plan and leading response and recovery operations are properly trained on their functions as well as those of the other teams.

Thus, training is a key part of a business continuity plan’s success. But training isn’t enough. To ensure adequate preparation, you also need to conduct exercises that simulate a safety incident and require workers and teams to respond accordingly. Although exercises are time consuming, they’re the best way to ensure that the plan is effective. If there are holes in the plan, you want to identify them during an exercise—not an actual emergency. You can then integrate the knowledge gained from these exercises into the plan.

5. Quality Assurance Techniques

You can’t simply create a business continuity plan, train workers and team members on it, run a few exercises and then throw the plan in a drawer until you need it. As a company’s business and operations change, the plan will need to change accordingly. So companies should review their plan internally:

• On a regular basis, such as annually or bi-annually;
• When workplace hazards change;
• When substantive changes to the company occur; and
• After an exercise to incorporate the lessons learned from it.

In addition, the company should consider having an outside consultant audit the plan to verify the procedures used to determine the critical services and processes and the plan’s overall methodology, accuracy and comprehensiveness.

Conclusion

Whether or not you’re a member of the senior management committee that’s responsible for your company’s business continuity plan, as a safety coordinator, it’s your responsibility to ensure that senior management understands the implications a safety event could have for the company’s operations—and its bottom line. If your company doesn’t have a business continuity plan at all, talk to senior management about creating one and make sure the plan addresses all possible disruptions to the operations, including safety incidents. If the company already has a plan but it doesn’t address safety incidents, try to convince senior management to revise the existing plan so that it does. Your efforts could spell the difference between whether your company recovers from a safety incident or is financially crippled by it.

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