Business continuity planning

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
    • Summarize
    Summarized using AI
    This content was generated using new OpenAI-powered functionality. Results are provided on an as is basis and are not guaranteed to be accurate or complete.

    Summary of Business continuity planning

    Business continuity planning (BCP) enables your organization to prepare for and mitigate risks during disruptive events by creating structured, comprehensive plans. These plans cover activities, documentation, loss scenarios, recovery teams, and approvals, all managed within the BCM UIB Workspace. Effective BCP equips your organization to respond efficiently to crises or adverse situations.

    Show full answer Show less

    Key Features

    • Plan Creation and Management: BCP owners or managers can initiate plans from the Home page or Planning record list in BCM UIB Workspace, adding necessary details such as scope, documentation, recovery teams, and related plans.
    • Review and Approval Workflow: Business impact analysis owners submit plans for review by business or IT managers, who then approve and archive plans as appropriate.
    • Structured Workflow Support: The system supports task workflows that guide users through the planning process, ensuring thoroughness and compliance.
    • Asset and Plan Integration: Utilize CMDB data in business impact analysis to identify and plan for critical assets, enabling precise recovery strategies.
    • Recovery Teams and Loss Scenarios: Define recovery teams with specific roles and identify loss scenarios tailored to departments or business units to direct effective response actions.
    • Setup and Administration: BCP administrators have dedicated setup tasks to configure the environment optimally for business continuity planning.
    • Plan Export: Generate PDFs of approved plans for offline reference or distribution.

    Practical Application for ServiceNow Customers

    As a ServiceNow customer, this capability allows you to:

    • Create detailed business continuity plans using a structured and repeatable workflow within the BCM UIB Workspace.
    • Leverage existing CMDB configuration item relationships to accurately identify critical assets and dependencies during impact assessments.
    • Assign and manage recovery teams with defined roles to ensure clear accountability during disruptions.
    • Implement approval processes involving relevant business and IT stakeholders to maintain governance and compliance.
    • Use documented loss scenarios to anticipate potential disruptions and prepare effective recovery strategies.
    • Maintain an organized lifecycle of plans—from creation through approval to archiving—ensuring plans remain current and accessible.

    By following these processes, your organization can enhance resilience, minimize downtime, and ensure business continuity in the face of adverse events.

    Business continuity planning helps you enact and mitigate risk at the time of an event. You can address and plan on the primary scope of the activities, documentation, loss scenarios, recovery teams, approvals, and so on. You can then configure a structured workflow of your business continuity planning tasks in BCM UIB Workspace.

    When you create a comprehensive business continuity plan for different possible disruptive scenarios, your organization is equipped to face a crisis or any adverse situation.

    Steps involved in creating a business continuity plan

    Typically, the following steps involved in creating a business continuity plan:
    • The BCM program manager or planner creates a business continuity plan either from the Home page or the Planning record page in the List view of the BCM UIB Workspace.
    • The BCM program manager or planner adds additional details for the business continuity plan such as its scope, documentation section, recovery teams, related plans, and so on.
    • The business impact analysis owner reviews the information and submits the analysis for a review and approval to the business manager for services or IT manager for applications respectively.
    • The business manager, IT manager, or BCM lead review the details of the business continuity plan and approve it.
    • The approved business continuity plan is moved to Approved and later, it is moved to the Archived state.
    • The business continuity plan owner can generate the PDF of the plan and save a copy for reference.

    A typical business continuity plan workflow is shown in the following example:

    Business continuity plan workflow.

    Setup tasks for business continuity planning

    If you are the BCP administrator, you can view Setup for a business continuity plan for information on the BCP setup tasks.

    Creating a business continuity plan in Business Continuity Workspace

    if you are the business continuity plan owner, you can create a business continuity plan in Business Continuity Workspace by using one of the following options:

    • You can navigate to the Planning tab in the Home page and select Create BCP as shown in the following example.

      Planning tab in the Home page.

      For the description of the cards and action buttons in the Planning tab of the Home page, see Home page view.

    • You can also navigate to the List view and select New in the Planning records.

    To create a business continuity plan in Business Continuity Workspace, see Create a business continuity plan. For information on managing tasks related to a business continuity plan, see Structured workflows for BCPs.