Business continuity fundamentals: from critical activity to a first plan
Six lessons and one case followed end to end, to go from “what must we keep doing at all costs?” to a first usable plan.
A free professional introduction with no prerequisites. You learn to tell incident, crisis, continuity and recovery apart, to frame a first scope, to run a first impact analysis, to set your recovery objectives against the capabilities actually available, to structure an operational plan and to put it to the test through an exercise. Every lesson applies to the same fictitious case, then to your own organisation. A final ten-question assessment leads to a certificate of achievement.
Learning objectives
- Tell incident, crisis, continuity and recovery apart
- Identify a critical activity and its dependencies
- Understand how the impacts of a disruption grow over time
- Distinguish recovery objectives from the capabilities actually available
- Structure a first operational continuity plan
- Understand the role of exercises in continual improvement
Intended audience
- Continuity, risk, security or operations managers taking on the role
- Consultants who want a shared baseline method for their engagements
- SME executives who want to structure their organisation’s preparedness
Prerequisites
- No technical prerequisites
- Knowing how your own organisation works helps with the exercises
The running case: Norvane (a fictitious organisation)
Norvane is a fictitious organisation created for this course; any resemblance to an existing company would be coincidental. This regional distributor of medical and hygiene consumables employs 140 people and supplies around 1,400 professional customers — pharmacies, nursing practices, care homes for older people and five clinics — from a single warehouse. It relies on business software rented online and on a carrier that handles 85% of its deliveries. After a nine-hour outage of its business software, the chief executive asks the operations manager to put business continuity on a proper footing. You follow that work lesson by lesson.
Detailed curriculum
Module 1
Setting the frame
What business continuity covers, and who is accountable for it.
Module 2
Analysing
Measure impacts over time, then set objectives against actual capabilities.
Module 3
Acting and improving
Write a usable plan, then put it to the test through exercises.
Assessment method
Final online assessment: 10 single-answer questions drawn at random from a bank of 15. Pass mark: 80%, that is 8 correct answers out of 10. The score is computed by the server, every attempt is followed by commented answers, and you may try again. It is an unproctored knowledge check.
Document issued
A certificate of achievement when the assessment is passed; a certificate of participation when all six lessons have been read, each one to the end. These documents are issued by Continuity & Resilience and can be verified on this site using their code and the holder’s name. They attest that an introductory course was followed and a knowledge check passed: they are neither a professional certification nor evidence of compliance.
Continuity & Resilience editorial team· version 1.0· revised on