Keep essential services running through any disruption
When the unexpected hits, your community and customers still depend on you. A Continuity of Operations (COOP) plan ensures your essential functions keep running, and recover quickly, no matter what disrupts them.
Disruptions rarely arrive with warning. A COOP plan answers the questions that matter in those first hours: which functions absolutely cannot stop, who performs them, where the work happens if your primary site is unavailable, and how quickly everything must be restored.
We build Continuity of Operations and business continuity plans that are specific to your organization, not a checklist. That means a clear-eyed look at your essential functions, dependencies, key personnel, vital records, and alternate facilities.
The goal is simple: when something goes wrong, your team knows exactly how to keep the doors open and the mission moving.
Continuity that fits your operations
We identify what truly can't stop, and build realistic strategies to keep those functions running, whether the disruption is a power outage, severe weather, a cyber incident, or loss of a facility.
COOP works best when it connects to your broader emergency program. We align your continuity plan with your EOP and exercises so the whole program reinforces itself instead of living in separate binders.
For agencies and healthcare organizations, we make sure your plan meets the continuity expectations that grantors, regulators, and accreditors look for.
Standards & frameworks we work in
- FEMA Continuity Guidance Circular
- NIMS & ICS
- EMAP standards
- Sector-specific continuity requirements (healthcare, government, business)
What actually belongs in a COOP plan
Continuity planning answers a narrower question than emergency planning: when something disrupts you, what must keep running, who runs it, and from where? Most COOP plans fail not because the answer is wrong but because the question was never narrowed.
Essential functions. The small number of things your organization must continue doing. The discipline is in being ruthless — if everything is essential, nothing is prioritized, and the plan gives no guidance under pressure. Most organizations land on somewhere between five and fifteen. Each one needs a recovery time objective: how long can it be down before consequences become unacceptable?
Orders of succession and delegations of authority. Who makes decisions when the usual decision-maker is unreachable, and what specifically are they authorized to decide. This should go at least three deep and be documented in advance, because it is precisely the question nobody wants to resolve in the moment.
Alternate facilities and work arrangements. Where essential functions move. Post-2020 this is often remote work rather than a physical alternate site, which is cheaper and raises its own questions about connectivity, access to systems, and equipment.
Vital records and systems. What information the essential functions require, where it lives, how it is backed up, and how it is reached from the alternate arrangement. This is where continuity planning and IT disaster recovery meet, and where the two are most often planned in isolation from each other.
Communications. How you reach staff, and how staff reach you, when normal channels are unavailable.
Reconstitution. How you return to normal. The most frequently omitted section, and the one that determines how long a disruption actually lasts.
What does not belong
Detailed emergency response procedures belong in your EOP, not your COOP plan. Continuity begins where immediate response ends. Conflating the two produces a document that is too long for either purpose.
Testing continuity
A continuity plan that has never been tested is a hypothesis. The cheapest useful test is a tabletop: put the leadership team in a room, remove the primary facility and two key people from the scenario, and see whether the plan answers the questions that come up. Most organizations discover their recovery time objectives were optimistic and their vital records are less reachable than assumed — which is exactly what you want to learn on a Tuesday afternoon rather than during an actual outage.
How a continuity plan is built
Continuity planning runs in one direction: you identify what must keep running, then work outward to everything that has to be true for it to keep running. Planning in the other order produces a document that never narrows.
Wondering whether your operations could weather a major disruption?
Let's pressure-test your continuity readiness together. Your initial consultation is free.
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