The lifecycle: six practices, one loop

A loop, not a line

The BCI corpus structures the discipline into six professional practices. Two frame, four produce.

The two management practices

PP1 — Policy and programme management. Mandate, scope, resources, steering. Without a written mandate signed by management, the practitioner holds only an opinion — and an opinion loses to a commercial objective every time.

PP2 — Embedding continuity. Making sure the right reflexes exist outside the continuity team. It is the least funded practice and the one that most reliably determines actual behaviour on the day.

The four technical practices

PP3 — Analysis. Understand the organisation: business impact analysis, threat assessment, dependency mapping. It produces durations and priorities, not opinions.

PP4 — Design. Select strategies and the response structure. This is the step most often skipped — people jump straight from analysis to plans — and the omission costs: you end up with plans describing solutions nobody decided to fund.

PP5 — Implementation. Develop and deploy plans, action cards, notification arrangements.

PP6 — Validation. Exercise, maintain, review. A successful exercise is not one without incident: it is one that reveals an actionable gap.

The loop closes somewhere

The sequence is not a line ending at PP6. Validation produces findings that invalidate part of the analysis: an RTO that does not hold, an unidentified dependency, a key person missing from the arrangements. Those findings feed back into PP3, and the cycle restarts.

The ten-minute test

To assess an existing programme without reading three hundred pages, ask four questions:

1. Who signed the policy, and when? An undated policy, or one signed by someone who left three years ago, reveals an orphaned programme.
2. Show me the last trade-off where continuity carried weight. If there is none, management does not own the subject.
3. What gap did the last exercise reveal, and where does the action stand? An exercise with no gap was too easy; a gap with no action was a wasted exercise.
4. What is the shortest RTO, and who set it? If IT set it, governance is inverted.

Four solid answers beat a complete binder.