“The plan is nothing – planning is everything”. In other words, your business continuity planning needs the right continual care and feeding, if it is to be effective and efficient in keeping your organisation ticking. BCOE800 is a one-day course from DRI International designed to help you do just that. It reviews different possibilities for testing and exercise of your BCP in the specific context of your organisation. It also enables you to acquire working knowledge of audit and maintenance processes so that you can see what works, what doesn’t and how to set about fixing things where needed. And it brings you one more key element too.
All of the areas mentioned above – test, exercise, audit and maintenance – are essential to well-functioning business continuity planning. Without trying out your plans at enterprise or departmental level, you’ll never know if they will really work when business disruption threatens. Without comparing performance with objectives, you may leave holes that make your plan ineffective. And if you miss out on the chance to compare with industry benchmarks, you could be sacrificing cost-effectiveness or efficiency. Developing a maintenance program is then the step to continually converge on BCP excellence. An additional component facilitates each of these components – good communication.
While BCOE800 is fast-paced and fun, it is emphasises practical results to be gained. Communicating well with colleagues and enterprise employees in general is a pre-requisite for meaningful exercises and tests. This applies to their execution and their results. People need to know why they are called upon to participate, what the importance is to the organisation as a whole, and what the results mean. Consequently, this course also overlays the principles and the practice of BCP exercise, audit and maintenance with useful methods of conveying key ideas and requirements to your organisation as a whole for overall benefit.