Despite the best efforts of some dodgy characters to convince you otherwise, business continuity management isn’t actually rocket science. But despite the fact that the BCM process is relatively straightforward, it can seem a bit daunting to the newcomer as there can be quite a lot of it.

But ask yourself this question – "how do you eat an elephant?". The answer is "one piece at a time". The trick is to carve up the elephant into manageable slices.

There are several distinct slices within the BCM lifecycle, including analysis and strategy, plan implementation, awareness, and so forth. And each of these can be sliced up further, into activities such as business impact, risk assessment, crisis management team selection, IT or business recovery planning and training, to name but a few. And several of these could be further sub-divided by location or business unit if appropriate to the organisation in question.

In fact, there are any number of ways that the business continuity elephant can be sliced up, allowing discrete and manageable chunks to be assigned to various "diners". The trick is to give priority, particularly in the early stages, to those that give the best return for the effort put in. And that means just a little bit of menu planning, before launching into the first course.