3PQ - Business Continuity Third Party Questionnaire - Project Page

Q. What is 3PQ?
Simply a consistent Third Party Questionnaire that can be used freely by Business Continuity Professionals to help manage Supply Chain BCM Capability.

The 3PQ project group was formed through the efforts of a number of experienced BCM professionals from the Business Continuity Group BANG! and supported by the Continuity Forum.

The 3PQ Supply Chain Questionnaire Master Document will be hosted by the Continuity Forum and will be freely available for download from this page.

The Continuity Forum is making preparations for an update and extension of 3PQ and we welcome your involvement.

We would like to hear from users, practitioners and other interested parties on how they feel 3PQ can be developed to meet the changing needs of organisations and planners.

We feel there are a number of key areas that need to be addressed in greater depth and these cover:

Cyber Risk
Climate & Extreme Weather Risk
Risk Managment Processes
Supply Chain Management Processes
Skills and Capabilites

We realy want to hear from you on how best to approach and intergrate these topics into the 3PQ structures. Here are some of our thoughts to get you started:

Should these topics be summarised in the principle questionnaire or should they be specific sub sections allowing more detail to be included.
Should there be inclusion of more on Skills and associated capabilities?
Should more specific details on Insurance be requested?
Should there be Corporate, Medium Enterprise and Small Business versions available?
How would you want these to differ?
Is there really an appetite for versions for Vertical Markets?

We are open to all your suggestions and opinions and you can contact us HERE with any comments or to get involved

More on the 3PQ Project

Originally a BANG! group, the 3PQ group is now made up of a diverse group of people working in the BC and supply chain management fields across public and private sectors.

There is an online BANG! LinkedIn Group and many of the members meet up regularly to socialise and share ideas or exchange insights that are of mutual interest.

A regular feature of BANG! meetings are short, often provocative, presentations on issues, problems or even frustrations that arise from the working in the Business Continuity field.

At one of these presentations Gayle Hedgecock, a highly experienced BCM professonal working in the financial sector, and Steve Yates spoke on a common industry frustration, namely the amount of time spent getting (and providing) information on BCM that needed to be shared between organisations.

Gayle and Steve struck a chord, and the idea was formed to create a consensus based Third Party Questionnaire that fitted most of the common needs of organisations and that could be easily adapted to address any specific requirements that may be required.

The 3PQ committee group was formed with Gayle Hedecock as Chair and our own Sara McKenna as deputy. A team was quickly assembled to contribute to the project, with the aim of creating a simple and consistent set of parameters that would enable Continuity Professionals to quickly gauge the capabilities of their suppliers and partners, whilst not creating a mountain of work for organisations.

The resulting 3PQ Questionnaire is being made available, free, to anyone that wishes to use it. The Master Document hosted on this site will be updated by the project group from time to time based on the feedback recieved and how it is working for you.

You can edit the document putting in your own organisations details, logos etc and add any questions that maybe be specific to your needs. We have provided the document in both original MS word format and a PDF version.

If you have any suggestions, additions you'd like to make or comments please do let us know. We'd be happy to extend the reach of the 3PQ project into other languages or add specific additional questions that may be relevant to your sector or region.

Please do get in touch if you would like to contribute and we'll look at adding your versions to the project page.

Introduction to the Third Party Supply Questionnaire for Business Continuity (MS Word)

Master Third Party Supply Questionnaire for Business Continuity (MS Word)

Introduction to the Third Party Supply Questionnaire for Business Continuity (PDF Version)

Third Party Supply Questionnaire for Business Continuity (PDF Version)

US page formats

PDF 3PQ Introduction and Questionnaire

MS Word 3PQ Introduction and Questionnaire

If you are unable to download the 3PQ documents due to Firewall or download restrictions you can mail us at 3PQ@continuityforum.org to receive them by email.

Legal Statement

To the extent possible under law, the authors have waived all copyright and related or neighbouring rights to this questionnaire.

More information on this (further legal information) can be found on the following site: http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

The Continuity Forum is pleased to have been able to contribute to this project, but is not responsible for any liability arising whatsoever from the use of the 3PQ documents.