Disruption is now a normal operating condition. Organisations depend on connected systems, outsourced suppliers and a handful of critical premises, so a single failure can cascade across customers, staff and partners. Boards, insurers and regulators increasingly expect proof that critical services can be maintained, and not just a binder of plans that nobody has tested.

This course teaches participants to build and sustain a practical programme from the ground up. It starts with governance, policy and scope, then moves through risk assessment and business impact analysis to identify priority activities, dependencies and tolerable downtime. Participants choose and cost recovery strategies, write concise plans that staff can follow under stress, and learn how incident command, crisis communication and recovery teams operate during a real event. The final sessions cover exercising, auditing, maintenance and the link between continuity and wider operational resilience.

Instruction is deliberately applied. Delegates work on a shared organisation scenario, producing an impact analysis, a plan extract and a communication protocol, and take part in a timed tabletop simulation that tests their decisions.

After the programme, participants will be able to:

• Establish the scope, policy and governance of a continuity programme.
• Conduct a business impact analysis and identify critical activities and dependencies.
• Set recovery time, recovery point and minimum service level objectives.
• Select and justify recovery strategies for people, premises, technology and suppliers.
• Write clear, usable continuity and incident response plans.
• Organise an incident management team and a crisis communication approach.
• Plan, run and evaluate exercises of increasing complexity.
• Maintain, audit and report on the programme against ISO 22301 principles.

The course serves staff who plan for or lead through disruption, such as:

• Business continuity and crisis managers
• Risk, compliance and internal audit officers
• Operations and branch network managers
• IT service continuity and disaster recovery managers
• Facilities, security and health and safety managers
• Heads of departments in banks, telecoms, utilities and hospitals
• County and national government emergency planners
• NGO country directors and programme operations leads

Participants leave equipped with:

• A completed business impact analysis template with scoring guidance.
• A short-form continuity plan they can adapt for any department.
• A crisis team call-out structure and decision log.
• Holding statements and a stakeholder communication matrix.
• An exercise scenario and facilitator guide for tabletop sessions.
• A twelve-month programme maintenance calendar.

The format is workshop-driven so participants build deliverables as they learn. It combines:

• Facilitator briefings kept short and tied to the standard
• A single running case organisation used for every deliverable
• Small-team impact analysis and planning workshops
• A tabletop crisis simulation with injected events
• Review of sample plans and past exercise reports

Vision Reach Global Consultancy awards a CPD-accredited Certificate of Completion to participants who attend the full programme and contribute to the workshop deliverables and the closing simulation.