Resilience has moved from a technical back-office concern to a board-level duty. Customers expect services to keep running, regulators in banking, insurance, telecoms and the public sector increasingly ask for evidence of tested recovery capability, and a single outage at a key supplier or data centre can stop critical services for days. Executives who cannot explain what must keep running, for how long and at what cost leave their organisations exposed.

This executive programme is pitched at decision makers rather than practitioners. Participants start with the governance of resilience: policy, appetite, roles for the board and executive committee, and the relationship between continuity, risk, cyber security and crisis management. They then work through business impact analysis, identification of critical services and processes, impact tolerance setting, dependency mapping across people, technology, premises and suppliers, and strategy selection for recovery. The programme also covers incident command, communication under pressure and learning from tests and real events.

The approach is discussion led and scenario based. Delegates review plan extracts, challenge assumptions in a live simulation, and finish by drafting a resilience roadmap and board reporting pack for their own organisation.

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

• Define the board and executive responsibilities for business continuity and operational resilience.
• Interpret the main requirements of ISO 22301 and relate them to enterprise risk management.
• Evaluate a business impact analysis and the critical services it identifies.
• Set impact tolerances and recovery objectives for priority services.
• Assess dependency and concentration risk across suppliers, technology and facilities.
• Lead decision making and communication during a major disruption.
• Commission and judge exercises, tests and post-incident reviews.
• Report resilience status to boards, regulators and auditors.

The programme is aimed at senior people who set direction for or answer for resilience, including:

• Chief executives, managing directors and executive committee members
• Chief operating, risk and information officers
• Heads of business continuity and crisis management
• Board members and audit and risk committee members
• Principal secretaries, accounting officers and heads of public agencies
• Heads of internal audit and compliance
• Facilities, security and ICT directors
• Heads of banking operations, insurance and telecom service delivery

Participants return to their organisations with:

• A set of board-level questions for testing the strength of a continuity programme.
• A prioritised list of critical services with draft impact tolerances.
• A dependency and single-point-of-failure map for one key service.
• A crisis decision log and communication template for the first 24 hours.
• A twelve-month exercise and testing calendar.
• A draft resilience reporting pack for the board.

The programme respects the limited time of senior leaders and relies on challenge and rehearsal:

• Executive briefings that stay short and focus on decisions
• Review of anonymised continuity plan extracts and impact analyses
• A multi-stage crisis simulation with injects and changing facts
• Peer panels on incidents from the participants' own sectors
• Coaching on a personal roadmap to take back to the executive team

Delegates who take part in all sessions and the crisis simulation are issued with a Certificate of Completion from Vision Reach Global Consultancy, accredited for continuing professional development (CPD).