Just as with any process, planning your design is critical. You should layout the design of your plan before entering anything into the system. The first area you should focus on is the data structure of your plan. Think of your plan as a system rather than a static document. In doing so, consider the unique types of data that your plan will contain.
These data types should be separated into:
- Textual-based data (i.e. policies, descriptions, etc.)
- Contacts (roles, groups, teams, etc.)
- Resources (assets, applications, buildings, etc.)
- Processes (checklists, workflow, notification procedures, etc.)
For each of these areas, break down the individual types of data. For example, review your plan to assess the various groupings of contacts. Typically, you will use contact data in three core areas, 1) Roles, 2) Groups and 3) Assignments. Create an outline of your contact data like the outline below.
- Plan Contacts
- Roles
- Plan Owner
- Function Manager
- Alternate Function Manager
- Roles
- Groups
- Crisis Management Team
- Department Employees
- Contractors
In Global AlertLink, resources encompass a wide variety of data elements. Create an outline similar to the one below:
- Plan Resources
- Applications
- Buildings
- Workstations
- Critical Records
Next, for each data element, determine if the data will be stored locally within the plan or shared across multiple plans. Also, begin to build an outline for your plan layout. You may want to think about how you would want the plan to be viewed when exported to a word document. Build an outline based upon the sections that would be contained within the plan.
- Business Continuity Plan
- Overview
- Groups
- Crisis Management Team
- Department Staff
- Roles
- Plan Owner
- Incident Manager
- Function Manager
- Alternate Function Manager
- Critical Vendors
- Critical Records
- Application Dependencies
- Functional Dependencies
- Resources Required
- Checklists
