Glossary

What is a business continuity plan?

Also called: BCP, continuity plan

Definition

Last updated October 2026

A business continuity plan, or BCP, sets out how an organisation keeps its most important work going during and after a disruption, such as losing a building, a key system or a supplier. It names the critical activities, the people responsible, the workarounds to use and the order in which things are restored.

In more detail

Continuity planning starts with a business impact analysis: which activities matter most, how long each can stop before the damage is serious, and what each depends on. The plan then sets out how each one keeps going, for example by moving staff to another site, switching to a manual process or using a second supplier.

A disaster recovery plan is part of the picture, but narrower: it covers restoring IT systems and data. A continuity plan covers the whole organisation, people and premises included. Neither is worth much untested, so most teams run an exercise at least once a year and update the plan from what they learn. ISO 22301 is the international standard for business continuity management.

Example

When a flood closes a firm’s office, its continuity plan has the team leaders confirm everyone is safe, switch staff to home working, redirect the main phone line and tell clients about any delays. The IT team follows its own disaster recovery runbooks to keep the systems running.

Business continuity in CheckFlow

In CheckFlow each part of the plan can run as a checklist with named owners, so on the day nobody has to search a document for what to do next. A schedule starts the yearly test exercise from a template, and each test keeps a record of what was checked, by whom and what needs fixing.

Recurring checklist software