Business Continuity Methodologies

There are many different ways to analyze the assets of a business - its people, processes, products, places, technology, business partners, customers - in order to determine priorities for recovery and protection in relation to business continuity management. Below is a list to get you started on some well-known analyses for analyzing business and impact.

Business Analysis

SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) Analysis — a method to develop strategies to achieve an objective by analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of the internal actor (i.e. the business) and the external opportunity and threat actors that may influence its outcome.

PEST (Political, Economical, Social and Technical) Analysis — also sometimes called SLEPT (L for Legal) or PESTLE (E for Environmental), this method examines the macroenvironmental factors that may impact a business strategy at present time or in the future.

Value Chain Analysis — a way of looking at the path of a product or key service and evaluating the value that is added to that product or service at each point along the path of its development, production, and delivery to the customer.

BCG (Boston Consulting Group) Growth-Share Matrix — a way of laying out your products and services on a matrix that divides them into cash cows, dogs, stars and problem children.

Marketing Mix — also known as the "4 Ps", this model looks at four components of marketing - Product, Place, Promotion, and Price.

Product Lifecycle — a system that asserts that a product has a limited life span, and that every product grows through stages of development, growth, maturity, and decline.

Competitor Analysis — this analysis involves the development of the array of competitors and performing competitor profiling in order to maintain a strategic advantage.

Market Analysis — an examination of a market in terms of different variables in order to understand the opportunities and vulnerabilities the company may experience within that market.

Target Market Selection — the identification of a target market to whom you will market your product; in combination with the marketing mix four Ps, this is the foundation of a marketing strategy.

Market Segmentation — identifying a subset of a market that shares common demands or needs, in order to better target specific products to market segments.

Situational Analysis — also referred to as the three Cs, this method examines Customers, Cost and Competition.

Pricing Strategy — there are many different strategies that can be used to select a price for a product.

Impact Analysis

Business Impact Analysis (BIA) — an analysis often used in business continuity to identify the time-sensitivity or criticality and dependencies of business functions and assets.

FRAGPLAN (Branches and Sequels) — a way of planning that involves building small, specific plan components that can be assembled to create a plan, rather than a focus on full end-to-end planning.

Business Process — the discipline of identifying business needs and developing solutions to business problems.

Process Flow Diagram (PFD) — a way of mapping out the flow of product through processes and equipment from beginning to end.

Project (or Program) Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) — an event-oriented project management methodology that allows a project to be scheduled without knowing the specific time requirements of each task.

Critical Path Method (CPM) — a way of mapping processes and assets into a time-based critical path, which has many project management applications including business recovery after an incident.

Time-cost/Opportunity-cost — a way to express the lost time or opportunity that results from making one choice over another when the two choices are mutually exclusive; for instance, if you choose lasagna over spaghetti for dinner, the opportunity-cost is the spaghetti.

Business Continuity Program Management

Business Continuity Institute (BCI) — a UK-based institute founded in 1994 for business continuity professionals, the BCI's methodology is called the Good Practice Guidelines.

Disaster Recovery Institute International (DRII) — a US-based institute for business continuity and disaster recovery professionals, the DRII follows a methodology of Ten Professional Practices.

British Standard Institute (BSI) — the BSI has been establishing business standards since the early 1900s; the BS-25999 is a globally recognized standarized methodology for doing business continuity.

BCM Institute — a 7-step methodology developed by Dr. Goh Moh Heng for a target business of an international bank headquartered in Europe.

Risk Analysis

Risk Assessment — the analysis of qualitative and quantitative risk based on measures of probability and impact.

Threat and Vulnerability Analysis — a step in the business continuity process in which threats and vulnerabilities to the organization are examined.

Strategies

Recovery Strategies — a strategy is a plan of action developed to accomplish a specific goal; these goals are identified in BIA and Risk Analysis, and planned for with recovery strategies.

Cost/Benefit Analysis — a way of evaluating the cost against the benefits of a particular strategy to determine whether the cost is acceptable.