Introducing the Business Continuity Planning Quick Start
Business continuity and business continuity plans (BCPs) are not new concepts. Making sure the people and processes at your company can continue to operate in the midst of unplanned or extraordinary circumstances is an essential capability for every business. And that’s what a good BCP should provide.
Increasingly, architects have to answer critical questions about business continuity: How do we get started creating a BCP if we don’t already have one? How do we know if our existing BCP is up-to-date? Can we really know if our BCP is good enough before we actually have to use it? What should a BCP include?
At Salesforce, we had to answer these questions for ourselves. And we’re sharing some ways to help you get started helping your companies and teams to deal with extraordinary circumstances and find ways to thrive.
That’s why we created the BCP Quick Start: a simple guide to get you started creating your company’s business continuity plan. Let’s take a closer look.
What’s in the BCP Quick Start?
With the TrailheaDX ’20 Version of the Salesforce BCP Quick Start, we’re sharing two tools to get you up and running with your own BCP fast:
- Getting Started Guide (linked above): Easy-to-use resources to understand the value and purpose of a BCP, get started with the BCP process, and see some relevant lessons we’ve learned at Salesforce.
- BCP Resources in Quip: We’ve created a blank template for a few common planning resources to help your team collaborate on the beginnings of your BCP.
How Should I Use These Resources?
If you’re not familiar with BCPs, you should check out our Guiding Principles for BCPs post. Once you’ve got the essentials, a great way to get started is to share the BCP Quick Start with your team and have a conversation. This could be asking about your company’s existing resources, or getting your whole team up to speed on the concepts.
And after that, you’ll see that a large part of building a good BCP is pulling people and processes together — and getting important information documented and stored in an easy-to-find place. (Which is where adapting some of the templates to fit your needs might come in handy.)
Finally, you’ll want to make sure your teams don’t view this as a “set it and forget it” exercise. You need to test your plan and adjust it as you discover shortcomings, and as systems or vendors change. And once you’ve got your BCP, it’s essential that reviewing and maintaining your plan becomes a part of how your company operates.
A solid BCP should inform the way you evaluate and design your systems, your technology stack and even how you choose the best architectural patterns to support and scale your business.
Where Can I Learn More?
- Add Business Continuity Plans: How and Why to Build One to your #TDX20 agenda
- Send your questions about business continuity to our Ask the Experts panelists: sforce.co/TDX20ASK
- Explore the dozens of resources in our Guiding Principles post (linked above)
- Download the BCP Quick Start and share with your team: https://sfdc.co/bcpkit
