Configuring plan template

Release version: Australia

Updated March 12, 2026

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Summary of Configuring plan template

As a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) manager using ServiceNow's Business Continuity Management application, you can efficiently create business continuity plans tailored to your business units for managing disruptive events. The application provides pre-configured plan templates that streamline plan creation by offering standardized layouts including document sections, loss scenarios, and primary recovery elements. These templates help focus efforts on plan content, tasks, and effective implementation, enabling organizations to identify and prioritize recovery of critical processes, locations, and assets.

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Using Business Continuity Plan Templates

The application includes demo data templates for common continuity scenarios, which can be found in the General Administration section. These templates cover:

Application DR Plan: Focuses on recovering IT applications after disruptions.
Business Continuity Plan: Ensures continuation of core business processes despite workplace, application, or vendor disruptions.
Datacenter Recovery Plan: Supports recovery of datacenters affected by disasters.
Workplace Recovery Plan: Plans for recovery of physical workplaces rendered unusable.

Each template targets specific primary elements to be recovered, helping you select an appropriate plan type and identify recovery priorities and timelines.

Creating Custom Plan Templates

If demo templates do not meet your needs, you can create custom plan templates tailored to your specific business requirements. Custom templates allow you to define recovery plans for unique primary elements like Employees or Web Servers and support different authoring types such as documentation, loss scenarios, and recovery tasks.

Pre-populating Tasks and Strategies

Plan templates can reference related recovery strategy templates, task template groups, and task templates. When creating a plan from these templates, the system automatically generates the corresponding tasks and maintains task dependencies. Specifically:

Plan-level task template groups and task templates generate tasks on the plan’s Recovery Tasks tab.
Loss-scenario-level templates generate tasks on the loss scenario’s Recovery Tasks tab.
Recovery-strategy-level templates generate tasks on the recovery strategy’s Recovery Tasks tab.

Configuring Task Templates and Template Groups

You can create and manage reusable task templates and task template groups to save and insert individual or grouped tasks into new or existing plans. This capability enhances efficiency and consistency across continuity planning efforts.

As a BCP plan manager, you can create a business continuity plan that can be used for your respective business units during a disruptive event. The Business Continuity Management application provides pre-configured business continuity plan templates. You can streamline the process of a plan creation by using pre-configured plan templates. You can also create a plan template for your business requirement.

You can view the pre-configured plan templates for business continuity planning in the General Administration section in the application navigator.

Using a plan template gives you a standard plan layout that has the document sections, loss scenarios, and primary elements that are to be recovered. Plan templates help you to focus on the plan content, its tasks, and the effective implementation of the plan.

Creating a plan helps an organization to identify processes, locations, and assets that must be recovered as a priority when there is a disruption. Selecting a plan type helps to identify the elements for recovery and the time by which it should be done.

Using business continuity plan templates

The Business Continuity Management application provides these business continuity plan templates that are installed with demo data:

Application DR Plan
Business Continuity Plan
Datacenter Recovery Plan
Workplace Recovery Plan

The business continuity plan templates that are installed with demo data are shown in the example.

See the table for more information on different types of demo data plan templates that you can use in the Business Continuity Management application.

Table 1. Demo data plan templates
Name	Primary element recovered	Description
Application DR Plan	Applications	Plan to recover an IT application following a disruptive event. A sample Application DR Plan template is shown in the example.
Business Continuity Plan	Business Processes	Plan to continue operations of a core business process or processes during a disruption to workplaces, applications, or critical vendors. A sample Business Continuity Plan template is shown in the example.
Datacenter Recovery Plan	Datacenters	Plan to recover a datacenter following a natural disaster or significant event that impacts the availability of a datacenter. A sample Datacenter Recovery Plan template is shown in the example.
Workplace Recovery Plan	Locations	Plan to recover a workplace in the event that one of them becomes unusable or uninhabitable. A sample Workplace Recovery Plan template is shown in the example.

Creating a plan template for your business requirement

Instead of using the demo data templates, you can create a template for your specific requirement. For more information on creating a plan template for your business requirement, see Configure the business continuity plan template.