Chapter 11

Validating Your Business Continuity Plan

In This Chapter

Introducing business continuity testing

Planning your exercise

Carrying out an exercise

Making your business more resilient as a result

Validation (introduced in Chapter 10) is the process of assuring your readiness for a disruptive event or crisis. In this chapter, we break this important task down a bit so you can be confident that the business continuity (BC) system you’re putting in place will work effectively when it matters.

Although people often use the terms ‘exercise’ and ‘test’ to mean the same thing, here’s how we use them in this chapter:

An exercise can be many different things (as we explain later), but all of them have the objective of exploring how your BC arrangements will stand up to the pressure of real events. An exercise needs to be a learning event that tells you about areas of strength and weakness, so make sure you listen and act on what you discover.

A test is a specific type of exercise that you either pass or fail, or are otherwise graded on. If you’re serious about knowing if your BC arrangements are up to scratch then consider bringing in some outside help to conduct a test exercise.

Don’t confuse training (learning about BC arrangements, roles, responsibilities and actions) with exercising. Realistically, exercises always enable people to learn more about BC and that’s a good thing, but don’t treat exercises as a substitute for training - you need to get yourself and your team up to speed before conducting an exercise, and most certainly before a test, otherwise you’ll only really learn that you haven’t done sufficient training!

Whether you call something a test or an exercise, however, the crucial thing is that afterwards you can answer the following key questions:

What have you learnt?

Where are the gaps?

What can you do to become more resilient?

If you can, you have lift off to greater challenges in future exercises.

To help you achieve this aim, in this chapter we discuss what a business continuity exercise is and why you need one. We talk about planning and running such exercises and guide you towards learning the required lessons in order to achieve resilience in the face of future disruptive events and forces.