Determining BCP Scope

The success and effectiveness of a Business Continuity Plan depends greatly on whether senior management and the project team properly define its scope. Business processes and technology can muddy the waters and make this task difficult. For instance, distributed systems dependence on at least some desktop systems for vital business functions expands the scope beyond core functions. Geographically dispersed companies — often the result of mergers — complicate matters as well.

Also, large companies are understandably more complex. The boundaries between where a function begins and ends are oftentimes fuzzy and sometimes poorly documented and not well understood.

Political pressures can influence the scope of the BCP as well. A department that thinks it’s vital, but which falls outside the BCP scope, may lobby to be included in the BCP. Everybody wants to be important (and some just want to appear to be important). You need senior management support of scope (what the project team really needs to include and what it doesn’t) to put a stop to the political games.

Scope creep (what happens when a project’s scope grows beyond the original intent) can become scope leap if you have a weak or inexperienced BCP project team. For the success of the project, strong leaders must make rational decisions about the scope of the project. Remember, you can change the scope of BCP projects in later iterations of the project.

The project team needs to find a balance between too narrow a scope, which makes the plan ineffective, and too wide a scope, which makes the plan too cumbersome.