Business continuity planning is one of those pieces of work Assistants often end up organizing without ever appearing in the finished document. You book the room for the annual exercise, you keep the emergency contact list current, you chase the actions afterwards, and you are the one who knows where the printed copy of the final plan lives. Then you read the plan properly, and it covers the building, the systems, the data, the suppliers and a list of named senior people, and there is nothing in there about the Executive Office at all.
I don’t think that is anyone being careless. Business continuity planning is built around functions and reporting lines, and our roles sit across all of them. When a system goes down, something measurable stops and somebody owns it. When an Assistant cannot work, nothing abruptly comes to a halt, but after a few days most people will notice your Executive’s week has completely come apart.
So this post covers two things. Getting yourself named in your organization’s plan, and writing a much smaller business continuity planning document for your own role, which is a different piece of work and does not need anybody’s permission.
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Business continuity planning follows more or less the same method everywhere. Someone lists the activities the organization can’t stop doing, estimates how long each activity could survive without the people or technology behind it, and then documents what happens if anything goes wrong and who makes the calls when it does. For example, payroll has to run, customers have to receive their goods or services, and regulators have to be responded to.
Business continuity planning then does the same for the people. There will be a section that says if the Finance Director is unavailable, this Deputy holds the authority, and here is where the bank mandate sits. Organizations are good at this for functions with a job family and a deputy already built into the structure.
The first reason is the one I have already mentioned; you do not appear on the plan because you do not appear on the structure chart in a way the plan recognizes. There is no obvious deputy for your job, and the people doing the business continuity planning are working from a list of departments rather than individuals.
The second reason is more annoying. A lot of what you do and how you contribute to the organization is not written down anywhere. The reason the popular venue will hold the room for you, the fact that a certain board member will not read anything longer than a page, the login for the system nobody else has ever needed. None of that is on a system somebody can be given access to. It lives with you, which is exactly what makes it a risk worth planning for, and exactly why business continuity planning never picks it up.
And there is a third thing, which I hear from a lot of EAs. Raising it feels like making a fuss about your own importance. I would push back on that. You are not asking to be treated as more important than anyone else; you are pointing out an operational gap in a document that exists to find operational gaps.
The best time to raise it is when your organization is already discussing business continuity planning. If your Executive owns the plan, or is reviewing a new one, or has just sat through the annual exercise, you have an opening you will not have to manufacture. The question is simple, and I would ask it plainly. “The plan covers what happens if you can’t work. What happens if I can’t work?”
Most Executives have never thought about it, and the honest answer is usually that they would find out the hard way. So bring the list with you, because business continuity planning conversations move faster when someone arrives with the details already written down. Yours might include:
What you want out of the conversation is small. A named person who steps in, agreed access so that person can actually do the work, and one line in the document. That is it. If your Executive isn’t the owner of the plan, ask who is and get an introduction. If the ask comes from your Executive, it will sound more like a business risk than a request.
Business continuity planning for your own role is the part I would not wait for permission on. If you have ever helped run an exercise for the organisation, you already know the method: what has to keep happening, how long it can wait, who does it instead, and what they need to do it. You can apply the same thinking to your own job in an afternoon.
This is not a handover note, and the difference matters. A handover assumes you are leaving on a known date and someone is there to take it over. A continuity plan assumes it is Tuesday, you are not there, nobody knew this was coming, and the person reading the plan has never done your job.
Good business continuity planning is short and specific. Write it for a competent stranger, and keep it shorter than feels comprehensive, because a forty-page document will not get read in the situation it was written for.
Then put it somewhere reachable when you are not. A document saved in your own drive that nobody else can open is of little use.
Business continuity planning for your role does not need a template or a project. Open a document this week and write the four or five things that would stop within forty-eight hours if you were not there, and next to each one, the name of the person who could do it and what they would need. That list is the plan, and it is also the case you take to your Executive next time the subject comes up. Then diary a reminder to look at it every quarter, because the in-flight section will be wrong within a month.
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