BCP testing builds resilience and strengthens your team
Business Continuity Testing has become a crucial aspect of training in any organisation. In many countries it is an industry requirement to have a tested business continuity plan, and to train your staff. This is key to ensuring a plan’s effectiveness. All personnel within an organisation should understand what plans are in place and expectations of them before, during and after a business interruption. Training personnel and testing your BCP are critical elements of having a business continuity plan.
“To ensure any plan is practical, meets the strategy criteria and can be easily followed by staff, a testing program needs to be developed and implemented.”
Testing of a Business Continuity Plan is critical - without a tested BC Plan your organisation does not have a plan that will respond effectively in a disaster.
The purpose of such testing is to:
test your plan
train the participants
Testing of your plan should be undertaken annually. If your organisation can show your insurance brokers that you have a fully tested and functional BC plan then that will take into consideration, especially if you have income protection insurance. This is because your organisation will recover more quickly and thus reduce the potential costs to the insurance underwriters. Standby’s experience is that it will normally take three attempts at testing and training your personnel before you have a fully functional BC Plan.
There are three basic approaches to testing your business continuity plan.
Tabletop Test
Scene of office adjacent to Twin Towers following 9/11 attack. Published with permission by FEMA
This is where the members of the Crisis Management Team (CMT)sit around a table and work through a scenario and check the BCP against the actions they would take. This approach is often beneficial where members of your crisis management team are taking a first look at the new BCP. It is however limited to the amount of training the members of your CMT will receive.
Scenario Test
In this test and exercise the members of the CMT work through a specific scenario. This can be a cyber-attack, loss of a building, an IT failure, or staff cannot get into work. The scenario test can be enhanced by adding in injects from social media, news media, calls from customers and stake holders. To give it more reality videos specific to the scenario and your organisation can be used. These videos add more pressure to the members of the CMT and give an air of reality.
This test will require participants to make decisions and take actions to deal with the event. These decisions often must be made with little information and under pressure, just as it would be in a real crisis.
Full Fail-over Test
This is where the organisation “fails their operations” over to a secondary location. It may be just their technology services, a Work-Station-Recovery site or a secondary office. This type of exercise must be carefully planned so that it will not impact production services and data being lost. A lot of knowledge and skill is required to carry out this type of exercise.
By carrying out a full fail-over test, it gives customers, legislators, Board members and stakeholders comfort that your organisation can operate when a crisis hits.
In all these examples Standby can assist in these exercises. We have experience BCP professionals who have worked through real events plus facilitated many of these exercises and tests.
BCM training outcome reports
At the completion of the BCM training exercise, we produce a comprehensive report of the tests carried out and actions to be taken. These reports provide good evidence to regulatory authorities and Boards of Directors’ legal requirements.
Even if Standby has not been involved with the development of your current BCP we can still plan and carry out effective workshops. Talk to us about how we can test and enhance existing plans and improve personnel awareness of BCP’s throughout your organisation.
Embedding Plans into an Organisation
Business Continuity Management (BCM) is an ongoing process which involves working with all types of different staff members and departments throughout an organisation.
Standby currently run a number of contracts in which we maintain, support and embed plans within an organisation. With extensive experience in BCM, we at Standby believe this is a highly effective method of achieving a more realistic recovery strategy as it allows for a deeper understanding of an organisation.
Click here for more information on Standby’s Ongoing Support Contract.
Specialist in Business Continuity Training and Testing of Plans