3.3 Calculation of Budget

BC Planning Phases

The three main phases of a business contingency planning project are:

a) Plan development
b) Plan implementation
c) Plan maintenance

Typically, plan development requires one member of staff to co-ordinate the project and to write the draft plan. This person should be familiar with the concepts of business contingency planning and should, preferably, have had previous experience in the development of BC plans.

Business group leaders and key staff should allocate two to four hours of their time to the project, during the development phase.

BC Planning and Development

Initial development, up to first draft, will take between four and twelve weeks, for a company size of 50 to 300 people. Companies of 1 to 50 staff will take three to six weeks and larger companies, up to 500 staff might take up to six months, or more. Practical implementation of the BC plans will take longer, but can usually commence immediately after the planning philosophy and strategy have been decided (see also: Section 4 - Contingency planning tasks).

Implementation costs will depend on the strategy chosen for recovery resource provision. A dedicated, fully equipped, off site data centre will be considerably more expensive than a shared environment. And data mirroring is considerably more expensive than back-up tapes, for duplication of computer data.

However, if the fully equipped off site data centre can be used as a production back up site, the cost of provision should be shared between normal production support and the BC project - thus reducing the BC budget, for this item, by 50 percent, or more (see also: Section 4.5.2 - Choosing a recovery strategy - Duplication).

The number of recovery staff required varies, depending on the particular business process and recovery strategy.

Some organisations choose Application Service Providers (ASPs) to provide and maintain their major business applications and data. The bcp budget and recovery strategy for these applications must include connectivity between the ASP and the organisation's recovery site(s), via fixed line, frame relay or dial-up connection. (see also: Section 4.5 - Choosing a recovery strategy).

For example, a marketing unit may be able to suspend work for one or two weeks, following a disaster. The recovery desk requirement would, therefore, be zero percent. Other recovery staff might be able to work at home. A back office unit might have two days' of normal transaction volumes to be processed, at the time of a disaster. Their staffing requirement might be close to 100% for the first two days, following a disaster. By introducing 'shift' working, the actual number of recovery desks needed could be reduced by up to 50%. However, this might be socially unacceptable.

For budgeting purposes, an average of 20% to 40% of normal staffing levels may be considered as the likely number of recovery desks required. This figure will be known more accurately after business processes have been prioritised, at the commencement of the BC project.