Disruption is now a normal operating condition. Cyber attacks, supply chain failures, extreme weather and infrastructure outages affect organisations of every size, and the cost of downtime grows with every hour services are unavailable. Supervisors and regulators increasingly ask not whether a plan exists but whether important services can be kept within tolerable limits during an incident.

The Best Practices in Business Continuity & Operational Resilience Training Course gives participants a complete method. They begin with programme governance, scope and policy, then carry out business impact analysis and risk assessment to identify critical activities and dependencies. From there they select recovery strategies, write plans for incident response, continuity, crisis communication and IT recovery, and learn how to embed awareness, training and supplier assurance. The final sessions concentrate on exercising, maintenance, audit and reporting to senior leadership, with attention to the shift from continuity planning toward broader operational resilience.

Learning is practical. Participants carry a fictional organisation through the whole lifecycle, completing impact analysis templates, plan documents and an exercise script, and discuss how to adapt each deliverable to their own environment.

After the course, participants will be able to:

• Establish the governance, scope and policy of a business continuity management programme.
• Conduct a business impact analysis and identify critical activities and dependencies.
• Assess disruption risks and set recovery time and recovery point objectives.
• Select recovery strategies for people, sites, technology, data and suppliers.
• Develop incident response, continuity and crisis communication plans.
• Design and facilitate tabletop and simulation exercises that test plans.
• Map important services and define impact tolerances in an operational resilience framework.
• Report continuity readiness and improvement actions to senior management.

The course will benefit professionals who plan for, respond to or oversee disruption, such as:

• Business continuity and disaster recovery coordinators
• Risk, compliance and internal audit managers
• Operations, facilities and logistics managers
• ICT infrastructure and information security managers
• Bank, insurance and microfinance operations heads
• Hospital, utility and telecommunications service managers
• Emergency planning officers in government and NGOs
• Executives and board members responsible for organisational resilience

Each participant leaves with:

• A business impact analysis template and a worked critical-process example.
• A continuity plan outline ready to complete for their own critical activity.
• A crisis communication checklist with role cards and message templates.
• An exercise script they can reuse for a tabletop session.
• A first draft of continuity metrics for management reporting.
• A prioritised roadmap for strengthening continuity at their organisation.

The training emphasises doing over listening:

• A single running case organisation used for every deliverable
• Template-based workshops completed in small teams
• A timed incident simulation with injects and decision logs
• Peer review of draft plans against a quality checklist
• Open forums on the continuity challenges participants face locally

Vision Reach Global Consultancy issues a CPD-accredited Certificate of Completion to every participant who takes part in all sessions and the planning and simulation exercises.