To be able to develop an appropriate Business Continuity Plan one must first understand his business and what activities or processes are essential to ensure continuity of business critical activity to at least a minimum level.
These questions provide a better understanding:

   What are the objectives of the organization?

   How is the business objectives achieved?

   What are the products/services of the organization?

   Who is involved internally/externally in the achievement of the business objectives?

Organizational Strategy
The output of a high level organizational risk management exercise can provide a useful input when setting the overall context for the Business Impact Analysis (BIA).

Business Impact Analysis
The BIA is the foundation work from which the whole Business Continuity Management (BCM) process is built. It identifies, quantifies and qualifies the business impacts of a loss, interruption or disruption of business processes so that management can determine at what point in time these become intolerable. It provides a data form which appropriate continuity strategies can be determined.

Risk Assessment
In the context of the BCM, a risk assessment looks at the probability and impact of a variety of specific threats that could cause a business interruption. Risk Assessment activity should be focused on the most urgent business functions identified during the BIA process.

This section is about determining and selecting BCM strategies to be used to maintain the organization’s business activities and processes through an interruption. BCM strategies concern:

Organization (Corporate Strategy)
An organization's Business Continuity Management Strategy works best when its vision, direction and parameters are given from the top of the organization

Process Level Strategy
A Business Impact Analysis will identify the priority of resumption of business critical processes and activities. At the process level strategy the complexity of interdependencies on services, processes, data and technologies needs to be analyzed.

Resource Recovery Strategy
This step provides the Resource Recovery BCM Strategy is directly linked to the business impact analysis and must document and evaluate the factors for:

   Deployment of appropriate recovery resources across a number of business critical processes and
      activities.

   Work area requirements- staff ratio, priority of business processes, location (in house or third party)
      and technology requirements.

The aim of this step is to identify the actions that are necessary and the resources which are needed to enable the organization to manage an interruption whatever its cause.

This stage in BCM involves assessing existing awareness level among workers, designing and delivering education, training and awareness to develop a good Business Continuity Management culture in the organization. The awareness campaign should also have provisions for revision and to identify any effort required to maintain it at an acceptable level.

A BCM capability cannot be considered reliable until it has been exercised, maintained and audited.