Know what needs to recover first.
If essential work stops, the impact on customers, revenue and daily operations can grow over time. We establish what your business needs back first and how long it can wait, giving recovery planning a clear business basis.
When it helps
When recovery priorities need to reflect how the business works.
Everything is marked critical
Every team has important work. If several activities stop at once, it is unclear which delays would hurt the business most.
- Identify the activities that support essential customer and business needs.
- Compare how disruption would affect each activity over time.
- Agree recovery priorities with the people responsible for the work.
You do not know how long you can wait
A short interruption and a missed delivery deadline can have very different consequences. Recovery planning needs to account for that difference.
- Identify the deadlines and busy periods that change the impact.
- Examine available workarounds and how long they could remain useful.
- Agree target timeframes based on when disruption becomes unacceptable.
Getting a system back may not restart the work
Your team may also need particular information, a supplier or someone with the right knowledge. Those dependencies are easy to miss in a technical recovery plan.
- Trace what each agreed activity needs in order to resume.
- Record the people, information, systems and suppliers involved.
- Identify shared dependencies that affect the order of recovery.
The business has changed since the plan was written
New customers, commitments or ways of working may have changed what matters most. You have a starting point, but little time to check it.
- Use your existing priorities and recovery assumptions as a starting point.
- Investigate changes that could affect their business impact.
- Confirm which priorities still hold and document any revisions.
Recovery priorities grounded in business needs.
We examine the agreed activities, their dependencies and the consequences of disruption. The result gives your team a clear basis for recovery planning.
Understand the impact before setting priorities.
- Review of the agreed business activities, existing plans and disruption scenarios.
- Discussions with relevant people about customer, revenue and operational impacts over time.
- Review of essential dependencies, deadlines and available workarounds.
- Agreement on recovery priorities, acceptable disruption and target timeframes.
- Documentation and a walkthrough of the findings, assumptions and open questions.
A clear basis for deciding what comes back first.
- An impact summary showing how disruption affects each agreed activity over time.
- A record of the people, information, systems and suppliers those activities depend on.
- Agreed recovery priorities and target timeframes, with the reasons behind them.
- Assumptions and unresolved questions to check against your recovery plans.
Not part of this analysis.
Any further work is optional and agreed separately.
- Designing recovery procedures, changing systems or testing backups and recovery.
- A complete asset inventory or detailed technical map of every system.
- Assessing the likelihood of security incidents or testing security protections.
How it works
We lead the analysis and work with the people who know the business, using existing plans and records wherever they help.
Agree the activities to examine
We discuss your concerns and existing plans, then agree the business areas, disruption scenarios, participants, price and timing.
Identify what each activity relies on
We review available records and speak with relevant people to identify the activities, deadlines and dependencies that matter. We record missing information without asking you to build a complete inventory first.
Work through the impact over time
We examine the effects on customers, revenue and daily work, including the limits of available workarounds. The people responsible for each activity check the assumptions and help agree how long it can wait.
Agree what needs to recover first
We document the priorities and target timeframes, explain the reasoning and identify questions to check against recovery plans. You leave with clear business requirements, including where evidence is still needed.
Need clearer recovery priorities?
An informal 30-minute call to discuss your concerns and see whether Business Impact Analysis is the right fit.