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A small business continuity team should coordinate planning, but it should not become the default owner of every plan, approval, and corrective action.
Clear BCM roles and handoffs distribute the work among program owners, business-unit plan owners, contributors, and approvers. Each person needs to know what they own, what they must provide, and how the next person will accept the work.
In short
- Assign one accountable owner to each planning activity.
- Separate program coordination from business-process ownership.
- Define what must be transferred and accepted at every handoff.
- Return exercise findings to the person who can update and retest the affected procedure.
- Use a shared system when plan status, versions, approvals, and exercise records become difficult to track.
Why Small BCM Teams Need Distributed Ownership
A one-person or three-person BCM function may coordinate an organization-wide program, but it cannot supply every operational detail or make every recovery decision.
Business-unit leaders understand their processes. IT and other specialists understand the systems and resources supporting them. A designated approver can accept the plan, return it for more work, or address an unresolved exception. The BCM program owner connects these contributions.
When the BCM team becomes the author, reviewer, chaser, approver, and maintenance owner for every plan, other departments can start treating continuity as someone else’s responsibility.
Clear ownership does not require a large committee. It requires a small number of defined roles and an agreed way to move work between them.
Four Practical Roles and a Compact BCM RACI
Titles vary between organizations. The responsibilities are more important than the labels.
- BCM program owner: Defines the process, templates, schedule, outputs, and review criteria. This person coordinates the work and reports status.
- Business-unit plan owner: Owns the accuracy and usability of a plan. This person confirms procedures, participants, dependencies, and changes.
- Subject-matter contributors: Validate information the plan owner cannot confirm alone. They may include IT, facilities, HR, communications, procurement, or supplier contacts.
- Designated approver: Confirms that the plan and recovery approach are acceptable, unresolved issues are visible, and required decisions have been made. Depending on the organization and the plan’s importance, this may be an executive, department leader, plan sponsor, or governance body.
Small teams may combine roles. That is not automatically a problem. Leaving accountability unstated is.
A RACI identifies who is responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed. The example below is illustrative and should be adjusted for the organization’s structure, policy, and approval requirements.
| Planning activity | BCM program owner | Plan owner | Contributors | Approver |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Define template, scope, and review criteria | A/R | C | C | I |
| Draft and update operating procedures | C | A/R | C | I |
| Validate systems, dependencies, and recovery inputs | C | A | R | I |
| Review completeness and cross-plan consistency | A/R | C | C | I |
| Submit plan for approval | C | A/R | I | I |
| Review and approve plan | I | C | C | A/R |
| Exercise the plan and record findings | A | R | R | I |
| Correct plan-specific findings | C | A/R | R | I |
RACI is only the responsibility map. It does not define what information must move between people or what qualifies the work as complete.
What a Complete BCM Handoff Must Contain
Sending a document or changing a task status does not complete a handoff. The recipient needs enough information to review, decide, or continue the work.
For each handoff, define:
- The plan, section, version, or finding being transferred
- The sender and person who must accept it
- Required supporting information and acceptance criteria
- The decision or action expected
- The due date and escalation route
- Where completion will be recorded
Consider a transfer from a plan owner to IT. “Please review the plan” is too broad. A useful handoff names the applications, recovery assumptions, dependencies, response date, and route for resolving disagreements.
The same rule applies to approval. A designated approver should receive the current version, a concise summary of material changes, unresolved exceptions, and the decision being requested.
A Small-Team Example and Where Handoffs Break
Consider a hypothetical program managed by one central owner. The order-processing plan belongs to the director of operations, who updates its manual procedures, staffing assumptions, and supplier contacts.
The plan then moves to IT. The handoff asks IT to validate three applications, their recovery targets, required integrations, and manual alternatives. IT confirms two but finds that the manual process still depends on an unavailable data export. The issue returns to the plan owner instead of remaining in email.
Once corrected, the program owner reviews the plan for completeness and consistency. The approver receives the current version, material changes, and one remaining exception requiring a decision.
An exercise later finds an outdated supplier-notification procedure. The finding returns to the plan owner, procurement supplies the new information, and the revised procedure is retested.
No single person completed the entire plan. Each stage still had an owner, expected output, acceptance check, and path back.
Common failures usually remove one of those controls:
- Responsibility without accountability: Several people contribute, but nobody can declare the work complete or return it for correction.
- An owner without acceptance criteria: A person is accountable on paper but has no agreed definition of a complete plan, review, or corrective action.
- Approval treated as the final step: The plan is approved, but no one owns maintenance, exercises, or changes resulting from findings.
- Review requests without scope: Contributors receive an entire plan when only a few assumptions require validation.
- Status stored in email: The current document, comments, approval, and follow-up actions live in different places.
A consistent BCM governance cadence can help a team revisit owners, open decisions, overdue items, and changes. The cadence works only when the underlying responsibilities are clear.
Continuity-plan ownership is also different from the team structure used during an active disruption. For incident-time roles, backups, and decision rights, see MHA Consulting’s guide to setting up a crisis management team.
Maintain Ownership as Plans Change
Roles and handoffs should be reviewed when the operating environment changes, not only during an annual policy review. Useful triggers include a new process owner, a changed system or supplier, a revised recovery approach, an exercise finding, an overdue corrective action, or the departure of an approver.
This lifecycle approach is consistent with ISO 22301:2019, the international standard for business continuity management systems. ISO describes a documented management system that is established, operated, monitored, reviewed, maintained, and continually improved. ISO does not prescribe the sample RACI in this article. The table is a practical way to make responsibility visible within that broader lifecycle.
For information-system contingency planning, NIST SP 800-34 Rev. 1, published and updated in 2010, provides more specific guidance on assigning plan-development responsibilities, coordinating with related functions, reviewing and approving plans, and maintaining them after organizational or system changes. Its stated scope is federal information systems, so it should be treated as a useful reference for technology-related plans rather than a general requirement for every BCM program.
Use Software Where Coordination Becomes Difficult
A RACI can live in a simple document. A small team does not need software merely to list four roles.
The case for a shared system becomes stronger when the team struggles to identify the current plan, track its status, gather reviews and approvals, retain exercise records, or report on work spread across departments.
BCMMetrics BCM Planner provides one place to create, edit, store, and share continuity plans. Teams can manage plans through draft, review, complete, and approved statuses, use secure links for review and approval, and record exercise results and reports.
The software does not decide who should own a recovery procedure or approve an exception. Those are organizational decisions. Its role is to keep plans, status, reviews, approvals, and exercise records together once those decisions have been made.
