Chapter 4

Focusing on What’s Important: Business Impact Analysis

In This Chapter

Organising your priorities

Assessing your vital business areas

Identifying your critical activities

Implementing a Business Impact Analysis

Although every aspect of your business is important, some things are absolutely essential for the running of your firm and others fulfil lesser roles. If you can’t fix everything at once and ‘something’s gotta give’ when disruption hits, you’re better off already knowing which parts of your business you can afford to put on hold and what gets priority treatment – you certainly don’t want to be making these decisions in the middle of an incident.

After deciding on these key products and services, you need to determine and prioritise the activities that are critical to delivering them. In this chapter, we help you identify these critical activities and look at their time sensitivity to help ensure that you don’t miss any when the pressure is really on.

We call this whole process Business Impact Analysis (BIA). By analysing your business in this way you can work out exactly what activities are critical and by when you need to recover them. In this chapter, we use the example of a bakery to illustrate the various stages of performing a BIA.

Although the idea of carrying out a BIA may appear pretty daunting and involved, in fact it’s less confusing (but possibly more important) than it sounds. When done well, a BIA lays the foundations for good business continuity (BC) arrangements for your organisation.