If you or any of your champions, use sticky notes, traditional notebooks, or Excel spreadsheets for creating your Business Impact Analysis lists, it’s likely you’re not as productive as you could be. Physical lists are easily lost and not shareable, PDF format lists are clunky, and spreadsheets are time-consuming and don’t offer features such as the ability to tag a teammate in a to-do that could truly boost your team’s productivity and collaboration efforts.
These basic methods of creating and managing task list templates are lacking, and so are most of the rigidly one-dimensional BIA templates you’ll find on the web. We’ll explain why they’re lacking and show you how you can adopt a BCM Assistant for your team that can help you get more done.
What’s a task-based User Interface, and why are they helpful?
A task-based User Interface (UI) is an effortless hack on how you capture information from your champions effortlessly. It’s the typical BIA questions you use for a Business Impact Analysis data capture — complete with all the headers, categories, basic processes, and more already in place — but follows a stepwise intuitive conversation that will fill out all the necessary information related to each specific stage of BIA.
Having task-based UI templates will help you develop Business Continuity Program quicker. It means you don’t have to start from scratch with a blank spreadsheet, and instead, you can get right to Impact Analysis, Risk Assessment, and Business Continuity Plans. You can share the value chain with your department or company, so you can create streamlined processes everyone on the team can understand, follow at-a-glance, and make use of. Using task-based UI templates can help existing employees and teams collaborate more smoothly, improve time management, and give new hires a sense of direction when it comes to BCM workflow.
Why do most BCM tools fall short
There are thousands of templates and tools available on the internet — the vast majority of which look like a replica of Google sheets, Excel templates, Microsoft Word, or free printables — but they’re not worth your time.
They’re too generic, they’re clunky, and by the time you set them up for your Business Continuity needs, you may as well have created it from scratch. They’re also lacking features that could help improve collaboration on your team, like being able to get verification on an updated task from BC Manager by tagging or receiving approvals or comments from your department head.
Too time-consuming
Most BCM tools are so generic and one-dimensional, you end up having to use a lot of workarounds to fit your use case because they don’t offer the customization that you need. They’ll include the basic items like BIA, Risk Assessment, Business Continuity Plans, but it’s on you and your team to figure out Recovery Strategies, Risk Treatment status, Training, Testing, and organization certifications like ISO 22301.
Most tools don’t give you the ability to nest information inside the tool themselves.
Perhaps you’re adding a new process to your department BIA, and each new process you're creating is a critical process to be recovered within 24 hours. It would help to be able to identify interdependencies, decide to treat single point of failures, identify recovery strategy options, define business continuity plans, monitor their implementation, cascade verification/approvals from BC manager, department heads, and the CEO, all within the tool while being able to test the plans and improve in real-time.
That’s not something you can easily do with a spreadsheet-based tool or spreadsheets in itself. It would require linking to all of the necessary documents hosted elsewhere, and at that point, you’re spending enough time editing and adjusting the documents you may as well have started from square one rather than hosting it on a one-dimensional tool.
Too clunky for collaboration
If you’re using spreadsheets on excel, you’ll end up having to send updated versions to your team to keep everything on track. You can easily end up confused and looking at multiple versions of the same spreadsheet that have resulted in redundant work and inconsistencies. Since changes don't update for everyone in real-time, you have to manually sync the different versions your team has been working from, so it’s easy to make mistakes when copying tasks from one version to the other.
If you do have your spreadsheets in a web-based tool, it’s easier for everyone to use the same document, but there can still be issues. For example, if two champions are identifying dependencies on each other for inputs and outputs to recover their process, their recovery time objectives need to be automatically flagged if not aligned. An HR department needing to share the list of payroll as a preliminary step, for the Finance department to initiate payments is an example of smart sequencing that is required. An enterprise view of critical processes and their interdependencies in real-time helps the BC manager to verify the sequence prompted by an intelligent assistant and helps manage the recovery goals identified so that the business continuity plans and recovery steps reflect practical, actionable, and effective steps. This intelligent sequencing needs an ai intervention and can be seen at work in BCM next.
Too stringent and inflexible
Simplicity is good, but when it comes to keeping your team moving forward and collaborating on recovery tasks, a spreadsheet is too pedestrian. That’s because it lacks the features and flexibility your team needs to be at their productive best. On a spreadsheet or word, tasks are reduced down to line items with limited functionality when the complexity of those tasks would benefit from the ability to include additional context and information. Say you have a critical enabler listed in your department. To complete drafting the recovery tasks, the person it’s assigned to must review their actions, verify their ability to meet recovery goals, and review by his department head before it's considered complete. You don’t want to over-complicate your spreadsheet-based tool with each of those smaller items, but you also don’t want the person assigned to the task to forget those critical recovery steps. A spreadsheet or spreadsheet replicated tool doesn’t offer a good solution for this.
How to identify an effective BCM assistant for your team
Instead of spreadsheets and tools, start with an ai assistant that makes creating a task-based UI program for your BCM team easy. Here’s what you should consider when identifying yours.
Start with understanding the difference between a tool and an assistant
Choosing the right software is the most important step. It can mean the difference between having a task list that’s so tedious and cumbersome to use that your team doesn’t use it and having an ai assistant your team relies on to get the job done well. You want something that allows you to make changes and collaborate easily while saving time. Look for features that offer the flexibility a spreadsheet tool lacks, like the ability to prompt recovery goals, including playbooks, tag team members, add enabler-based recovery steps, train one learns and test recovery steps in real-time, and more.
You can find these features in BCM next, where we have an ai assisted UI that adapts to your program needs. You can even have focused information shared with the BC manager, Department head, Champions, Critical Staff and CEO.
Decide the need and scope for your BCM program
While some BCM Programs only need to cover the operations functions or departments based out of specific locations, others may need a holistic program covering the entire locations, departments, and even external suppliers or third-party contractors as part of the program. The scope of the program could be driven by the organization's appetite or external regulations. If complying with external certifications such as ISO22301:2019 is a priority, it's critical to choose a tool or an assistant that enables your program to comply with the mandatory requirements of the certification.
In BCM next, the assistant guides the BC Manager through a program module, that enables compliance to ISO22301 from the word go. It monitors compliance through consistent checks and populates real-time compliance through an auditor view, summarizing the pain points that need fixing.
Consider which status you need for your tasks, and customize them based on your process.
Appreciate the criticality of the BCM program appetite
Again, you want to be specific, but you don’t want to get too bogged down in details. You’re trying to balance ensuring everyone using the program has enough information to understand the appetite and program objectives without complicating them. Does it make sense to link the Minimum Business Continuity Objective (MBCO) with the classification of critical and non-critical processes? Would it be helpful to be able to edit and save the impact matrix and the related fields in BIA get auto-populated?
By assigning an MBCO and defining the program time objective, an assistant should be able to predict process prioritization, filter right data being utilized for subsequent steps, and trigger verification or approval requests based on changes in resulting recovery steps, while still being able to easily revisit program appetite and objectives.
You can customize your program objectives and appetite in real-time in BCM next. Change the MBCO and impact matrix as many times as you need.
Segregate action mode and preparation mode
Now that you’ve figured out what details you want to be included in the BCM program, Segregate tasks and actions you would want to be utilized during a crisis vs those you would like to utilize to prepare for one. Yes, that means you have templates for your BCP in a crisis vs templates where you would need to fill in data beforehand. That way, each time you activate BCP, all of the pre-defined recovery steps will be already there, waiting to be executed.
The segregation will come useful when an ai assistant like BCM next helps you define scenarios and pilot them, preparing them better for a real scenario.
Review and Approve your BCM Program
Once you’re finished creating Business Continuity Plans for your program, Your plan is ready to be used only if the risks identified have been treated or recovery strategies identified have been implemented. Simply utilize an assistant to monitor the status, notify owners, and flag pending actions to ensure lagging tasks are completed and the BCM program stays relevant and ready to use.
Consider whether it would be helpful to have an assistant monitoring this complex program or a team of consultants or employees would be required. In either case, it is critical to have a real-time, single point of reference that enables effective recovery against disruptions.
Ready to deploy BCM assistant
BCM next is a predefined assistant that helps you define, design, embed, and improve your ISO 22301 compliant BCM program with ease. Our studies indicate that BCM next performs 90% of the functional capabilities of an advisory consultant or employee, at 10% of the cost.
As a ready deploy cloud-based assistant, explore BCM next and get started on your next evolution of Business Continuity.
- BCM next, Operations Coach
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