Regardless of industry, every business faces difficulties, disruptions, and possible scenarios affecting productivity, profitability, and the right development of activities and deliverables. For this reason, companies, regardless of their size, occasionally carry out business impact analyses to identify potential risks, support their activities, and ensure procedures. The right document for this is a Business Impact Analysis Template. This file allows you to organize and describe features, tasks, activities, and crucial timelines and deliver crucial insights into movements, decisions, and measures.

A business impact analysis, or BIA, is a procedure you or your project team carry out to identify and analyze how possible disruptions shall impact the crucial procedures and activities within your business and the company's overall performance from a cost-benefit perspective. In other words, a BIA is an impact assessment through which you evaluate possible scenarios and their direct and indirect effects on operations, results, and financial statements.

A business impact analysis has as a final goal to evaluate risks and create strategies that help to minimize consequences in case those risks appear. Moreover, BIAs give relevant insight into recovery priorities and whether it is worth continuing with operations or making changes is better.

A BIA brings multiple benefits to your business. The most recognizable benefit is the possibility of anticipating risks and mitigating their effects. Other benefits are the following:

• It provides crucial information insight the senior management requires to plan data-backed recovery strategies. It’s essential that major heads in administration, such as the CEO and managers, have all the data for risk assessment and plan tactics to prevent losses. 

• It helps you to identify essential activities and resources. Your organization's team members may carry out dozens or hundreds of activities with multiple resources, and it's difficult to identify which are fundamental for the continuity of operations. A BIA is crucial for identifying essential activities and resources, which may lead to saving costs.  

• It provides insights into the financial impacts of disruptions. Identifying and analyzing tasks, raw materials, resources, and potential disruption lets you know how much your production and sales will be affected. Consequently, it can improve your understanding of budgeting and enable you to cease investments in high-risk activities.

• It gives crucial information to create a business continuity plan. Another goal of a BIA report is to ensure the continuity of activities and procedures regardless of the intensity and size of disruptions. Planning involves recalculating budgets, timelines, deliverables, and more, and a BIA tells you what is necessary to continue with activities.

• It helps all the organization’s members get involved in business continuity planning. Analyzing possible impacts in activities requires each head of a business unit or department to assess activities and resources needed. To do this, they ask all team members to participate in the analysis and value downtime.

• It helps you establish the priorities. You can understand the sequence in which the disrupted key business functions and IT systems should be restored.

BIAs allow you to evaluate the impact of disruption on your business function or a particular process within the company. At the same time, it allows you to determine and understand key functional and operational dependencies.

Although a business impact analysis can be a simple document – for instance, only describing inputs, outputs, resources, timelines, and potential risks – it’s recommended to include other essential pieces of information.

• Executive summary. It’s a short introduction outlining each BIAS and proposal section. It introduces stakeholders and investors to persuade them of what they will read in the succeeding sections.

• Overall scope and objectives. It corresponds to a broad outline of the project or task. The scope is also the perspective through which you see the process, defining all deliverables the document will bring. The overall scope aims at reaching objectives that must be clear and specific. 

• Methodology. It indicates the steps, procedures, and techniques your team members will use to collect and analyze all the crucial data of activities and tasks. You should also indicate the channels you will use to identify potential disruptions and risks.

• Summary of findings. Here, you indicate the main insights you have deducted in the previous steps and after analyzing data. 

  • The most relevant business processes. Crucial activities and tasks that allow procedures and production to continue. You describe the people in charge of these processes and the resources needed to carry them out.

  • How a disruption can affect a specific area of business. Upon meeting the possible disruptions that can appear during the development of activities, you should be able to calculate possible consequences related to productivity, budgeting, and financial statements. 

  • An estimation of the Recovery Time Objective (RTO). It’s the maximum tolerable length of time your operations can stop. RTO depends on the nature of the particular activity and the relevance of it for the entire process or organization. The RTO is a function to which the interruption disrupts normal operations and the revenue lost per unit of time because of the disaster. 

  • An estimation of the Recovery Point Objective (RPO). It corresponds to the maximum amount of data lost after recovering from disasters. RPO also dictates procedures for disaster recovery planning by referring to the last point when the data was preserved in a usable format. It also indicates how frequently you must back up your data for disaster recovery. 

  • A comparison of the financial and recovery costs of a disruption. The success of any business is summarized in the cost-benefit equation. You should face financial and recovery costs and determine if the first surpasses the latter. It means the resources and budget you use for recovering are less than finances. 

• Supporting documents. You should include all documents supporting your data gathering and analysis. For example, bills, invoices, expenditures lists, timelines, charts, graphs, etc.

• Recovery’s recommendations. In the final section of your BIAs, you should include some recommendations for superiors, managers, or stakeholders about strategies they should adopt to prevent procedures from disruptions and mitigate risks.

Creating an impact analysis template BIAs may take four simple steps, described below.

Planning is fundamental since BIA is a regular project with even more specifications and details. As such, you must clarify the overall perspective, the scope of the analysis, and the main goals and objectives. But beyond general aspects of the BIA, define resource requirements, timelines, the budget, stakeholders, and even possible customers that can be affected by disruptions and how to compensate them. 

Collecting impact information is likely the most relevant step when building a BIA since success in analysis depends on the quantity and quality of data you gather. Crucial information you shouldn’t miss out when collecting data is the following:

• The functionality and effectiveness of key business processes. As mentioned earlier, the BIA process identifies and evaluates crucial activities to erase inefficient tasks that can provoke disruptions. It also will help you to save time and resources.

• Inputs and outputs of the process. Inputs correspond to tools and things you use to implement a project. On the other hand, outputs are tangible and intangible products resulting from activities. Awareness of both aspects, such as your technology and the final deliverable, will let you know if your efforts agree with the results.  

• Resources and tools required. These can fit in the “Inputs” category, but it’s recommended that you specify even more what resources and tools ensure productivity and continuity in operations. 

• The timeline of the process. The person responsible for the project should be clear about the project's duration and be capable of delivering a Gantt chart or descriptive timeline with milestones, objectives, and allocated resources. 

• End-users of the process. The final consumer of a product or service determines many of the aspects of the final product, such as the design and benefits. Knowing the targeted consumer lets you know what aspects can be overlooked.  

• Potential disruptions to the process. Every business should know that possible flaws and disruptions can appear during the process. Knowing their frequency, odds, or severity will let you anticipate the facts and take measures. 

• Financial, operational, and legal impacts of such threats. Highlighting the significance of addressing potential disruptions and their impact on your business is highly important. Managers' decisions will depend directly on these impacts and any measures they take. 

Once identifying and analyzing information, verifying and assessing the data you get through the business impact analysis questionnaire with coordinators and the process owner is important. The objective of this process is to identify vital functions and resources that are needed to keep systems working properly. This way, leadership can decide which functions are prioritized when processes are disrupted and reinstate them.

After the data analysis, the next step is communicating the findings and insights to heads, managers, and other stakeholders. Senior management can adopt recovery strategies to manage contingency better and anticipate consequences. 

Describe analyzed data and report findings, mentioning recovery priorities supported by graphs, data, visualizations, and other useful tools. You should also include recommendations to the senior management conducting the best restoration in case of disruption.

To enhance the development of your impact analysis process, we share four templates that facilitate your job and that you can easily download and edit thanks to Microsoft Office applications. Like templates, here, on RoyalCDKeys, you can get a reliable copy of Microsoft Office 2021 Professional Plus Key Retail Global and use classic Office applications immediately.

This bundle is easily installed and boasts the most useful business administration and budget management software. Get it now at the lowest price on the market. Now, let’s go straight to these essential templates.

Download it from Smartsheet.

The template reports on how critical business functions are specific to banks, like market shares, economy performance, stock value, and profit. This risk probability assessment gives a company a better sense of how it can bounce back after a worst-case disruption caused by uncontrolled economic events. This form calculates and summarizes costs through dollar and non-dollar impacts to create a crucial disaster policy for banking companies. 

Download it from Imperial.ac.uk

This template is a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet document that can be easily edited and filled out with data from analysis. You can describe any item and create a single data source for teams and managers from the BIA. This template is optimal for creating a change management communication plan and exchanging ideas and points of view.

Download it from Thecontinuityadvisor.

This document is very similar to the previous one since it’s a spreadsheet document putting together all the crucial aspects any BIA should contain. On the one hand, it contains the names of the products and services that are critical to be mentioned. 

A big difference is that this template contains sections and subsections for better data organization. The sections included impact and resumption timescales, deliverables, stakeholders, and resources needed. They allow you to define the Maximum Acceptable Outage (MAO) and describe the justification for the MAO and the recovery time objective. Other sections also let you describe normal patterns for delivering the activity, seasonal variations, time schedules, IT hardware and applications, mobiles, special equipment, and partners and supplies.

Download it from Wordtemplatesonline.

Contrary to the previous ones, this template corresponds to a Microsoft Word document containing multiple sections describing the business process, system points, business disruptions, critical time, etc., in detail and defining recovery strategies. 

This document also contains instructions and grids to quickly insert collected data from functions supported by the application to key stakeholders that have invested in the project. This template is designed for a team looking to capture, describe, and implement measures to mitigate the effects of potential disruptions.

BIAs will help you save money and time when facing disruptions or functionality issues while carrying out activities within your organization. The templates shared above are crucial documents to deliver a good report and anticipate any problem your organization may have. Thus, we invite you to check and download them to start to analyze processes within your business, improve functionality, and prevent further issues and disruptions.