This seminar is designed for professionals at all levels who are involved in or have been given the responsibility of business continuity planning and disaster recovery functions.  It is also highly useful for internal and external auditors, IT and telecommunication managers, administrative and operational heads and others responsible for the effective administration and preparedness of any size of organization. It is particularly suitable for individuals new to business continuity planning or for business continuity planners who wish to improve their knowledge and skills.

DAY 1 

Business continuity planning is fundamental to the well-being – and potentially even survival of an organization. Clearly, it is intended to ensure continuity in the face of unforeseen or difficult circumstances

• Introduction to Business Continuity Management
• ISO 22301 ‘’specifies requirements to plan, establish, implement, operate, monitor, review, maintain and continually improve a documented management system to prepare for, respond to and recover from disruptive events when they arise’’
• What are the potential risks, those known and potentially unknown
• Identifying critical business processes
• Business Impact Analysis (BIA) with example questionnaires: 
• Determining impacts of business interruption
• Assessing the time-sensitivity of impacts
• Developing impact mitigation strategies
• Establishing the 'maximum tolerable downtime' of critical processes
• Determining minimum resource requirements for business resumption
• Practical exercise; BIA and Risk Assessment

DAY 2

• Identify potential future risks and their impact on the business unit/industry utilizing Scenario Planning & techniques learned from Day One
• Introduction to Scenario Planning and why choose this strategy
• Possible objectives of your Scenario Planning strategy
• Successful factors of Scenario Planning followed by:
• The 8 steps of Scenario Planning
• Agree scenarios and identify recovery strategies and key resources
• Developing BCM plans and who should be involved
• Establishing the BCM and identified Recovery team members
• Recovery Time Objectives (RTO’s)
• Resource provisioning
• Identifying contingency and longer term recovery strategies for critical business processes
• Case Study and exercise - Producing a Business Continuity Plan

DAY 3 

• Parts of the plan essentially include procedures to enable an effective and efficient response and the process for recovery management
• Crisis Management overview providing an effective, fit for purpose documented framework for the organization to respond to and manage an range of events, foreseen and unforeseen
• Initial response and assessment
• Implementing an Incident Command Framework 
• Emergency Centre Management
• Stakeholder/Media Management
• BCM - Project coordinators & Functional organizational chart
• Case study - Returning to normal

DAY 4 

• The Recovery Phase, by definition, this is also likely to involve external agencies including government and potentially even the media
• Criteria for determining whether a potential crisis situation exists
• First task - Is there an actual or potential threat to human safety
• Do you adopt an Evacuation or a Shelter policy
• Handling the Incident/Emergency Situation
• Mobilizing the Disaster Recovery Teams
• Notification and Reporting During Disaster Recovery Phase
• Human resilience strategies in the Recovery Phase
• Involvement of external agencies, what is it they want to know
• Reputation Management

DAY 5 

• Keeping the Plan Alive - Validating and Maintaining your Business Continuity Programme. It is best to discover gaps and weaknesses of your business continuity plan during a testing exercise rather than during a real crisis situation. How to validate strategies, assumptions, procedures, and guidelines specified within your business continuity plan.
• Testing and exercising Business Continuity plans
• Maintaining and administering Business Continuity plans
• Business Continuity training and awareness programmes
• Auditing and evaluating Business Continuity plans 
• Benefits of testing
• Types of validating methods
• Importance of a test programme
• Test - content
• Test - preparation and development
• Test - implementation
• Test - evaluation
• Test - report and follow up
• Case Study and exercise