Resilience is no longer a back-office concern. Boards, regulators and customers expect critical services to continue through disruption, or to be restored within tolerances that were agreed in advance. Basic continuity plans that sit in a binder are not enough when disruption is digital, interconnected and fast moving.

This advanced programme assumes participants already know the vocabulary and want to raise the standard of their continuity management system. It begins by moving from plan-centred thinking to service-centred resilience, using critical services, impact tolerances and dependency mapping. Participants then deepen business impact analysis and risk assessment, evaluate strategic options for people, premises, technology and suppliers, and examine how a mature system is governed, resourced and audited against ISO 22301. Later sessions address crisis leadership, decision logging, stakeholder messaging and the specific demands of ICT disaster recovery and cyber incident response.

The final part of the course is devoted to exercising and improvement. Participants design a scenario, run it under pressure, record findings and convert them into a corrective action plan that management can track.

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

• Map critical services, their dependencies and impact tolerances across an organisation.
• Conduct a rigorous business impact analysis and set justified recovery objectives.
• Assess disruption risk, including supplier, cyber and concentration risk.
• Evaluate and select continuity strategies for people, sites, technology and suppliers.
• Structure a continuity management system that meets the requirements of ISO 22301.
• Lead crisis management teams and manage communication during a major incident.
• Design, run and evaluate exercises and convert findings into improvement actions.

Because the content is advanced, it is aimed at practitioners with prior exposure to continuity or risk work, such as:

• Business continuity and resilience managers
• Enterprise risk and compliance heads
• Operations and service delivery directors
• ICT, disaster recovery and information security managers
• Emergency, facilities and safety planners
• Internal auditors reviewing resilience arrangements
• Procurement and vendor managers responsible for critical suppliers
• Executives sponsoring a continuity programme in banks, utilities, government and NGOs

Participants leave with working tools and a plan of action:

• A critical service and dependency map for their own organisation.
• A business impact analysis template with a defensible method for recovery objectives.
• A gap analysis against ISO 22301 clauses with priorities.
• A crisis playbook outline with roles, triggers and communication templates.
• An exercise design pack including scenario, injects and evaluation form.
• A board-ready summary that explains resilience in terms of risk and cost.

The sessions treat participants as peers and concentrate on the harder judgements in resilience work. They include:

• Facilitated workshops on real services brought by delegates
• Critique of anonymised plans and impact analyses to expose common flaws
• A pressured crisis simulation with timed injects and an observer debrief
• Standards clause walk-throughs with practical interpretation
• Peer coaching on presenting a resilience case to executives

On completing the programme and its practical simulations, each delegate receives a CPD-accredited Certificate of Completion issued by Vision Reach Global Consultancy. This recognises attendance and active participation in the exercises, and it does not constitute a certification in ISO 22301.