[Best Practices] Business Continuity Planning 💼

 

Hello Community! 🙌

 

Many businesses may find themselves in need of business continuity planning these days. In this post, we’ll show how you can create and manage this in Wrike. It will provide a roadmap to maintain operations during times of change. Business Continuity Plans vary for different types of businesses and industries, so in this quick guide we'll give you an overview of how this plan can be managed efficiently with Wrike’s tools.

 

You can create a new folder or even a space to manage your BCP. A space can be a good choice for a large company - you can invite all employees to it and keep all the necessary information, documentation and processes in this space so that it’s separate from your day-to-day work.

 

Create a folder structure (folders inside your BCP space or subfolders in a dedicated folder). The goal here is to have a clear structure to make things easy to find.

 

You can create folders for the main planning areas relevant to you. For example, these could be:

You can create more or different folders depending on your goals, or start with these three and use them as the foundation for your BCP.

Here’s an example of what you can do once you have identified the key areas of your BCP and created a corresponding folder structure:

 

1) Project Risk Mitigation planning

 

You can start by creating a Project Risk Update request form. This will allow you to collect updates on potential project risks. Quick and systematic updates on project statuses can mitigate potential fallout and manage stakeholder expectations. All project risk updates collected with the Project Risk Update form are consolidated for review as tasks in this folder/subfolder. Using Table View will present a view of all project risks and their potential impact on revenue. You can create custom fields that will represent important details like Planned Revenue, Revenue at Risk etc.

 

2) Employee Details

 

In this workflow, the Employee Remote Work Status Update request form can help with the following:

 

The tasks created upon this form’s submission reside in this folder and we recommend regular checks using the Table View to have a clear report-like view. 

 

 

You can also create a dashboard and reports to track your employees’ updates on their work status.

 

 

 

3) Communication Planning

 

Your COVID-19 Rapid Response communication plan can be stored in this folder as projects. Create a communication plan that will provide your team and customers with a centralized response. For this, you can create separate projects for internal and external communications, as well as a Rapid Response project, and view them in Gantt Chart.

 

 

Make sure that you communicate how to use this space to all stakeholders and set expectations clearly on what your team members need to do - update their work statuses, projects at risk and all the other actions that need to be performed. It’s very important that everyone understands each step, so be sure to overcommunicate.

 

We hope you've found this guide useful! Please note that a pre-made Business Continuity template is available to account admins on Business and Enterprise accounts - you can find it in Wrike Assistant, and by clicking “Use this template” you’ll have a space with folders, tasks and Wrike tools added to your account.