Plan your organisation’s business continuity programme: decide which goals come first, who will do the work and what resources are available. You also plan how to involve staff and review progress. The result is an annual programme with assignments, staff hours and a procedure for a rehearsal.
Plan an annual business continuity programme with assignments, owners, available staff hours and review dates. Work on your organisation or a substitute case and adjust your plan to limited capacity.
In the course case, eight specialist hours are available. Compare a recurring presentation with a two-hour rehearsal of an untried fallback and subsequent correction of the plan. Use a sample procedure with a missing handover to check the time required and adjust the programme.
What you will work on
Prioritise three annual objectives by mandate, contribution to continuity and available capacity, and justify the sequence.
Assign work packages, responsibilities and resources so that critical tasks and review decisions have a named owner.
Plan and walk through a fallback procedure within eight staff hours.
Who it is for
Business continuity programme lead
Head of resilience or continuity management
Senior manager with programme responsibility
Topics
Programme mandate, scope and interfaces
Deriving annual objectives from business, risk and resilience needs
Prioritisation under resource constraints and dependencies
Roles, responsibilities and decision rights
Awareness and participation formats for different audiences
Regular programme reviews, development and documented adjustments
Your result
Your annual BCM programme assigns tasks, staff hours and review dates. In the rehearsal, you identify a missing handover and correct the plan.
Prerequisites
Experience with basic business continuity concepts or comparable resilience work; access to the mandate, outline risk and continuity information, and the resource framework. A course case is acceptable where confidential data is unavailable.
Format and approach
Planned: 10–12 hours of self-study, with templates, annotated counterarguments and self-checks.
Create a first continuity plan for a critical process in your organisation. Define the minimum service needed during a disruption, its dependencies and the steps for recovery. The plan records responsibilities, assumptions and open decisions for discussion with the process owner.
Examine a business process from your area of responsibility, assess the consequences of interruption and develop a recovery plan. Agree priorities and resources with other participants and revise your contribution after feedback from another professional role.
During a power outage, a water service needs a contractor's mobile pumps. The contractor also serves other customers and needs water for its own operations. Determine what minimum service remains possible under those conditions.
