There are lots of things you can do to improve the chances of developing a robust, fit for purpose business continuity plan. Listed below are seven ways to make sure it’s a spectacular failure!

1) Leap straight into the plan writing phase without any thought for analysis, strategy or the specific solutions that will underpin the plan; 

2) Take a pre-written business continuity plan template and simply insert your organisation’s name. Don’t bother to customise it any more than that – no-one will notice;

3) Do it in isolation. After all, there’s no need to trouble anyone else when they’re all so busy with far more important things than thinking about the survival of the business. In particular, don’t bother to get any executive support for the business continuity programme;

4) Think of as many different scenarios as you possibly can and write a separate plan for each. Ideally the resulting document will be two or three metres thick!;

5) Implement an IT recovery plan without talking to the business about what they actually need;

6) Don’t bother to exercise or test. Everything’s bound to just work perfectly without any problems or glitches;

7) Don’t provide any training, awareness or education for those who have roles within the plan. After all, they’ll just know instinctively what to do and how to do it when the time comes.

The above will, quite rightly, seem utterly ridiculous to the more enlightened reader. But they are all things that have been, and continue to be, done by real people in real organisations with predictable results. Please don’t join them!