In today's world, having a solid Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is essential for any organisation. But once the Board agrees on the need for a BCP, who should take the lead in making it happen? This isn't always an easy question to answer, but it usually involves appointing a senior sponsor and a dedicated project manager (PM).
The best sponsors are those who truly understand and value Business Continuity (BC) and resilience. Think of BC as a practical insurance policy: planning, preparation, and practice are the premiums you pay to ensure your organisation can recover from major disruptions. An outdated or weak BCP can fail when needed most, misleading stakeholders. Unlike traditional insurance, BC is a governance obligation and is mandatory for many organisations, but you are fully responsible for making sure it works.
Achieving an effective BCP means developing the capability to rebuild an organisation in minutes, hours, or days—something that evolved over years or decades. To deliver this, you'll need to perform a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) to determine how quickly you need to recover each product, service, process, and system, and identify which scenarios to plan for. Your plans build on this, with tests demonstrating you can recover acceptably.
So, who is best placed to own this? Many aspects of BC focus on operational disruption, so perhaps your COO is an obvious candidate. But then, BC provides an aspect of risk management required by many insurers, so maybe the CRO is best placed (if you have one). Almost every aspect of business is underpinned by finance and technology, so the CFO, CIO, and/or CTO hats can also be thrown into the ring.
What we are seeing is no de facto “home” for BC sponsorship, save that it always has a strong operational component requiring technology appreciation and insight.
When our consultants are assigned to a project, we hope for a BC sponsor with seniority, buy-in, and energy. We need their influence to fully engage key individuals and drive the project to completion. We need their authority to roll out policy and plans, adapting and testing to ensure it works. BC can be a hard sell, so perhaps most of all, we need their support, presence, and enthusiasm, communicating and helping us embed BC in day-to-day business.
The BC project manager should be empowered by the sponsor and tasked with producing working BC capability in the organisation. To do this, the PM needs solid organisational skills and familiarity with the business. They need enough seniority to be credible, but not so much that they have no time to properly fulfil the role. They might either be a direct report to the project sponsor or an individual selected specifically because of their experience, knowledge, and skills. They should be familiar with continuity risk environments, ideally based at a site addressed by planned-for scenarios.
Our ideal PM has all the above characteristics but ideally, few preconceptions about how BC should be carried out. Similarly, PMO assignees tend to be short-term and risk diluting long-term BC priorities to satisfy project ideals. Our perfect PM is in it for the long term, buys into our approach, efficiently harvests and provides the information and insights we need, facilitates our workshops, circulates drafts, verifies our deliverables prior to sponsor signoff, and helps us keep the project on track. They may then oversee the implementation of improvements to make the BCP work effectively, maintaining it and facilitating tests to prove it works.
We have long experience completing BC projects across most sectors of industry and we’ve encountered many combinations of drivers and circumstances. Here are some of the sponsor + project manager role pairings that have worked well:
In our experience, the key to a successful BCP lies in having knowledgeable, committed individuals in these roles, ready to go through multiple tests and improvements to ensure the plan delivers maximum benefit and value.