Business Impact Analysis (BIA) Template - Free Excel Download

Business Impact Analysis (BIA) Template - Free Excel Download
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With uncertainties always clouding the business world, it becomes imperative to stay geared to fight the contingencies arising out of these uncertainties. Business impact analysis is one of the techniques that can be used for tracking uncertainties. To help you in conducting a BIA for your business, we have here a free business impact analysis template along with detailed instructions on how to use it. This template is made in Microsoft Excel and can be downloaded from Brighthub’s Media Gallery.

Basic Information

The first section of the template requires some basic details to be filled in like:

  1. Name of the business unit for which the impact analysis is being carried out.
  2. The basic purpose of conducting the BIA.
  3. The BIA can be assigned a unique reference number for future references.
  4. The date on which the business impact analysis was conducted.

Points of Contact

This section is meant for storing the contact details of the persons who play significant roles in the critical functions to be identified in the subsequent sections. In addition to the name, designation, and the contact details of these POCs a short summary of their role must also be included. The internal and external points of contact must be recorded separately, as can be seen in the template.

Resources

A resource list containing information about all the external, internal, and data resources that are essential for the critical functions can be detailed out in the resources section of the business impact analysis template.

Critical Functions

This is the section where all the critical activities that have some bearing on the smooth running of the business unit should be enlisted. Each of these critical functions should be assigned a reference number and a priority, in addition to describing the expected output from each of these functions. The priority can be assigned on a scale of 1 to 10 – where 10 is highest priority

and 1 is least priority.

Impact of Functions

This section will describe the disruption impact for each of the functions that have been listed in the critical functions list. In the free business impact analysis template that you have downloaded from the above link, you are required to use one sub-section each for detailing the impact of each critical function.

The first column is meant for a list of the impacts caused by the disruption of the critical function being analyzed. Impacts can be like delay, financial loss, or breakdown. For each of these impacts, you also need to determine the timeframe in which the impact of the disruption will be obvious. This timeline can range from one day to six months. The last column requires supportive reasoning to explain why the disruption in the critical function will result in that specific impact.

Impact Recovery

This last section is reserved for putting up details about what will be done for recovering from the impact of disruption of each of the critical functions. This will require details about what resources will be used to diffuse the impact, the back up arrangements that are already in place for fighting the impact, and a short summary of the strategy to be used for dismissing the impact of disruption of the critical activities.

The free template that has been provided with this article can be customized by the users to accommodate the specific needs of their business.

Screenshot by: Sidharth Thakur