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.
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:
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.
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.
Templates are used to guide the documentation of the plan.
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.
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.
If there are any changes required, submit a revised completed template to your Organisation BCM Coordinator.
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.
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.
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.
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.