Date:        Wednesday, November 10, 2010

 

Time:        3:45 pm - 6:00 pm

 

Location:  Liberty Mutual Weston North

                  175 Berkeley Street, Boston, MA

Building Access: Please Bring Your Government Issued ID!
Proceed to the B/C Conference Room

Focus: The value of exercising your business continuity plans.

Presenter: Denis Goulet - ContinuityLink

Denis is a BCCE, CBCP, MBCI and a globally experienced BCM educator from Canada, who has trained BCM professionals throughout North America, Europe and the Middle-East.

Do you repeat the same old table top exercise over and over, every year? Are you confident that your BCM exercises bring value to your BCM program? Do you run exercises as you would recover from a real event? In other words, are you testing what you should???

Everyone agrees that an untested BCM plan is worth the ink and the paper on which it is printed. Moreover, BCM plans change constantly because they are regularly updated in order to stay synchronised with the organization… that these plans attempt to rescue. Of these 2 points, it appears that we must test BCM plans and that we must do it regularly.

This is all very nice, but how can we be sure we are testing what we should and that we are testing correctly? Is it sufficient to test equipment or must we also exercise the people with the execution of the documented procedures in the BCM plans?

First, we will see how to create a multi-year exercises program. With this program we will be able to define short and long term test/exercises objectives enabling us to execute our BCM plans in situations as close as possible to the reality of a disaster. Then, we will see how to plan a BCM exercise, from objectives definition to the production of a report to Senior Management. Finally, we will review an example of exercise organization.

Agenda:

· Introduction
· BCM Exercises program
o    Objectives
o    Tests or exercises?
o    Types of exercises
o    Budget
o    Frequency
o    Evolving exercises
· Planning of a BCM exercise
o    Examples of objectives
o    Planning steps
o    Performing
o    Evaluating
o    Reporting
·Organization of a BCM exercise (example)
·Questions, comments, evaluation