Creating a business continuity plan
Business continuity plans help the University plan for and deal with any major business interruption to ensure operations continue during the event and return to normal operations after the event.
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Key steps in Business Continuity Planning
Business continuity planning is an ongoing process that helps departments prepare for, respond to, and recover from disruptions. The planning consists of four key steps:
- Assess – Identify potential threats, evaluate their impact, and determine which functions are critical to your department.
- Plan – Develop strategies and document procedures to maintain or restore critical functions during and after a disruption.
- Validate – Review, test, and exercise plans to ensure they are practical, effective, and understood by staff.
- Maintain – Regularly review and update plans to reflect changes in personnel, processes, technology, facilities, and organizational priorities.
Importance of a Business Continuity Plan
A Business Continuity Plan helps your department continue its most critical functions during a disruption and recover as quickly as possible. By planning in advance, your team can respond more efficiently, reduce downtime, protect essential services, and avoid having to make critical decisions under pressure. A well-developed plan provides a clear roadmap for responding to disruptions, coordinating recovery efforts, and restoring normal operations.
Elements of a Business Continuity Plan
Every Business Continuity Plan is tailored to the department’s operations, but most plans include:
- Critical functions and recovery priorities
- Dependencies, such as vendors, utilities, and supporting departments
- Response and recovery procedures for likely disruptions
- Key personnel and emergency contacts
- Essential systems, equipment, and resources
- Alternate work locations or contingency arrangements, when applicable
- Plan review and approval information
Together, these elements help departments maintain essential operations, minimize disruption, and recover more quickly from an incident.
Identifying critical processes
A process is considered critical if its disruption would significantly affect the University’s ability to protect people, support patient care, meet legal or regulatory requirements, research, education, or other essential operations. Critical processes are those that must be restored within an acceptable timeframe to minimize operational, financial, regulatory, or reputational impacts.
Which functions should be included in our plan?
Your Business Continuity Plan should include the critical functions your department is responsible for maintaining during a disruption, along with the resources, dependencies, and recovery strategies needed to support them. At a minimum, include any function that must be restored within your department’s designated recovery timeframe.
Responsibility
Each department is responsible for developing and maintaining its own Business Continuity Plan because department leaders understand their operations best. The Business Continuity Program provides the methodology, tools, training, and guidance to support departments throughout the planning process.
Business continuity vs. Emergency preparedness vs. IT disaster recovery
| Discipline | Primary Focus |
| Emergency Preparedness | Protecting people and property through preparedness, response, and life safety during emergencies. |
| Business Continuity | Maintaining critical business functions during and after a disruption so essential operations can continue. |
| IT Disaster Recovery | Restoring critical technology, systems, applications, and data needed to support business operations. |
Related offices and departments
Other resources
Emergency procedures for laboratory biohazards
Review the minimum requirements for responding to biological spills in labs working at Biosafety Level 1 (BSL1) BSL2 and/or BSL2+.
Policy or guideline
Safety data sheets
Review standardized documents with detailed information about the hazards, safe handling, storage, and emergency procedures for chemical products.
Tool
Introduction to laboratory safety
Quick links to CampusOptics and IBC meeting schedules. The list of Environmental Health & Safety (EH&S) specialists/inspectors by assigned department. The role of the laboratory principal investigator (PI) with links to helpful resources for lab registration, inspections and safety training.
How-to