As someone who has been through several regulatory surveys, I recall an old saying about these events: having something documented is better than having nothing documented.
The same applies to your continuity of operations planning (COOP). When you’re starting out, focus on assessing how different business interruption scenarios would impact your business units and the high-level strategies you’d employ. This will go a long way towards your planning efforts and easily demonstrate that you’ve considered responses to these events. A simple way to do this is to list out each of your work units at the facility, and rate the impact of each of the COOP scenarios if they were to happen. A simple rating of “High,” “Medium,” or “Low” will allow you to consider how much of an issue the various COOP scenarios would have to that work unit.
Next, apply some thought and assessment as to the types of recovery strategies you’d use if a specific scenario occurred. There are a few high-level categories of recovery tactics you could consider.
There are many more strategies you can consider, but these tend to be the most utilized. Next, combine the impacts of the scenarios with the strategies you’d select for each department you’re reviewing.
Your COOP Risk tool could look like this: