[5] [PD] WSQ Funded BCM Project: Implementing the Business Continuity Plan

Overview

At this stage, you are about to attend the second WSQ BCM workshop organised in-house. This 1/2 day session or Module 2 Session2 can be conducted after the completion of the Business Continuity Strategy phase.

This article is the forth part of the "WSQ Funded BCM Project" series.  This is the reading for participants embarking on a BCM implementation using a combination of training with funding from the Singapore government and consulting to develop, implement and finalize its BCM program for an organisation.

Developing the business continuity (BC) plan is one of the highlights of the BC planning project. To reach this point, you have had to understand the risk environment your organization is in, and focus your plan on disruption scenarios that are most relevant, e.g., denial of access to your office.

You also had to identify your critical business functions (CBFs), how quickly they needed to be recovered, and what resources (e.g. IT systems) were necessary for recovery. Following that, you selected a strategy to help you recover your critical business functions in the event of a disaster.

The Plan Development (PD) phase fleshes out the high-level strategy into implementable action steps to be taken before, during and after a disaster occurs.

The process of conducting PD in a WSQ-based BCM Project is as follows:

 1.  Supplementary Readings

Participants will receive emails containing bite-size information on business continuity strategies. There are too many ideas and concepts in BC planning to be discussed in great detail during the workshop. The supplementary readings help introduce participants to key concepts ahead of time, thereby making available time to cover more ground during the workshop.

What participants should do:

Participants are encouraged to read through the supplementary material and jot down any questions they may have. These questions may be asked during the workshop.

2.  Workshop [Onsite or Online]

The workshop is conducted to guide business unit BCM coordinators to use the strategies developed in the BC Strategy phase and fill in the details for how these strategies might be implemented in the organization.

Templates are used to guide the documentation of the plan.

What participants should do for the Onsite Workshop:

1. Participants are encouraged to read the email supplementary materials before the workshop and review the RAR, BIA, and BCS findings for their business unit.
2. The softcopy PD templates will be sent to participants before the workshop
3. Participants should load the templates into their laptops and have them available during the workshop.
4. Remember to bring to the workshop the templates from the previous RAR, BIA, and BCS phases.

What participants should do for the Online Workshop:

1. Participants are encouraged to read the email supplementary materials before the workshop and review the RAR, BIA, and BCS findings for their business unit.
2. The soft copy PD templates can be downloaded from the same E-Learning portal used during the prior phases.
3. Participants should complete the E-Learning Module and begin filling in their templates
4. Participants should then submit their completed templates

It is important to note that because the workshop is a 1-time group event, it is important that participants lock this event in their calendars. No repeat workshop will be conducted for absent participants and there is a possibility that SSG will not approve the course subsidy if the participant is absent for more than 75% of the module.

3.  Consultation and Assessment [Onsite and Online]

After the workshop, participants will have one week to complete and submit the templates to their Organisation BCM Coordinator, who will consolidate the templates and send the batch to the consultant. A consultation/assessment session (approximately 30 mins) has been arranged for individual departments to go through the templates with the consultants, and sit for a simple open-book assessment comprising a few easy-to-answer questions. This assessment is a requirement from SSG to qualify for government funding.

Assessment sessions can be conducted either face-to-face or online. In the event of the latter, Zoom will be used to facilitate the assessment between consultants and participants.

What participants should do:

1. Submit the PD templates to your Organisation BCM Coordinator on time
2. Before the consultation/assessment session, review your templates, and quickly read through the course materials
3. Attend the consultation/assessment session at the appointed time

4. If there are any changes required, submit a revised completed template to your Organisation BCM Coordinator.
   

What should participants do for Online classes:

1. Submit the Plan Development template to the E-Learning portal prior to the instructor's session
2. Prior to the Consultation/assessment session, comments will be sent over via the E-Learning Portal. Participants are expected to make edits to their BIA template prior to the session
3. Before the consultation & assessment session, review your templates, and quickly read through the course materials
4. Attend the consultation & assessment session at the appointed time (on Zoom)
5. Re-submit the final, revised template to the E-learning Portal

Be prepared for a fair amount of data collection in this phase, e.g. contact numbers and location of alternate sites. Recovery procedures will also need to be developed and documented in the templates provided.

The consultant will process the plan templates from all departments and compile into a final plan for submission to senior management.

4.  BC Plan Presentation

A BC Plan Presentation will be conducted to senior management to update them on the progress of the project and present a summary of the corporate plan to them.

What senior management should do:

1. Review the corporate plan summary
2. Endorse the corporate plan

This presentation marks the end of the development phase of the project. The next step is to test and exercise the plan.

The deliverable of the PD phase comprise a corporate plan component (what the organisation as a whole would do in a disaster) and a business unit plan component that focuses on what individual business units would do. Only the corporate plan component would be presented to senior management.

4.  Public WSQ Course

If you are attending a public WSQ course, this course is similar to the morning session for the WSQ-BCM-320 (Course code) and it is titled as "Developing Business Continuity Strategies and Plans"

Once this session is completed, you are now ready to attend the next one day session on "Testing and Exercising" workshop to be held on another day.