Drafting Activation Procedures and Protocols
Concrete steps to activate the plan in time
A continuity plan only becomes useful when there are written procedures that say exactly what to do in the first minutes of a disruption: who assesses the situation, with what criteria the decision to activate the plan is made, and what steps each team follows from that moment. A well-drafted activation protocol avoids the ambiguity that tends to paralyze organizations precisely when they most need to act quickly, defining clear thresholds, for example how much downtime or what type of event automatically triggers activation without needing a prior committee meeting. This matters because every minute lost deciding whether or not to activate the plan is recovery time irreversibly lost. A concrete example is including a simple, visual decision tree, not a long document, that anyone on call can follow at three in the morning without having to interpret complex procedures.