The art of success lies within the clarity of its vision. Humankind has been evolving in its vision to thrive, succeed and procreate the next. Records that once were hard for athletes to break have now become high school benchmarks. The evolution of humankind to become a multi-planetary species relies on the vision of the common society to enable, cherish and elevate towards the next. Business and Business Continuity programs have been no different.
The success of a business continuity plan relies on its vision, purpose, and aim of the outcome to be achieved in case of a crisis.
By the definitions of the standards, the vision of the Business Continuity Program is termed as MBCO - Minimum Business Continuity Objective. MBCO provides recommendations for what should be recovered and how thorough the recovery should be to get a business back on its feet. Such vision and goal get agreed and decided upon. This agreement trickles down to the operating phases of the BCM program such as Business Impact Analysis.
There are a few schools of thought, the general one being that MBCO has two subcategories: corporate or business-wide MBCO and business unit or department specific MBCO. What's the difference between the two?
The Business MBCO is management-centric, and it is not intended to go through every detail but rather to concentrate on the essential requirements for the company. On the other hand, Department-specific MBCOs would use the Corporate MBCO as a template and develop their own BU MBCOs based on the stated objectives. Aiming to provide continued mobile banking services in the duration of outages could be an example of Business MBCO. Enabling IT services to ensure 100% availability of Mobile banking services could be an example of IT business unit-specific MBCO.
A company's MBCO is an integral aspect of its Business Continuity Plan. It's inadequate to rely upon a list of resources needed to meet RTO (Recovery Time Objective). An achievable goal has quantified the level of recovery desired for the activity and then look at the resources required to achieve that level of recovery.
When considering MBCO, the business continuity manager or team looks at the possible consequences of not procuring specific products or services at a predetermined quality, quantity, or timeframe. The operational, financial, regulatory, social impacts, etc. are identified, evaluated and their respective impacts quantified.
Perhaps the disasters of recent supply chain shortages could be avoided in the future if the enterprise-wide companies agree upon their required MBCO’s and percolate further down to their departments for implementation.
An e-commerce firm identifying its critical services to be provided during Christmas and discussing that requirement with its suppliers, logistics partners, and Internet stakeholders enables an effective recovery plan, crisis communication strategy, and thereby higher probability of success.
Despite the potential, the MBCO is often neglected in traditional BCM programs owing to the dynamic need and complexity. Monitoring and deciphering an appropriate MBCO requires close coordination with executive leadership and operational stakeholders. BCM next enables this through its task-based user interface, which enables closer coordination between BCM manager, CEO, Department heads, and champions.
Learn more on how our MBCO focus automates the recovery plans. Reach out to us at getstarted@bcmnext.com
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