Overview
At this stage, you are about to attend the "Plan Development" Funded BCM workshop. It can be conducted together with the Business Continuity Strategy phase or on another day. 
This article is the sixth part of the "Funded BCM Project" series.
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 this Funded 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
The workshop is conducted to guide business unit (BU) 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 (before coming to the workshop):
Participants are encouraged to read the email supplementary materials before the workshop and review the recovery strategies that have been endorsed by senior management.
The soft copy PD templates will be sent to participants before the workshop; participants should load the templates into their laptops and have them available during the workshop.
Participants should also bring to the workshop the templates from the previous BC Strategy phase.
Participants should be advised 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 the course subsidy is not funded if the participant is absent for more than 75% of the module.
3. Consultation
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 session (approx. 30 mins) has been arranged for individual departments to go through the templates with the consultants.
What participants should do :
- Submit the PD templates to your Organisation BCM Coordinator on time
- Before the consultation session, review your BC plan templates, and quickly read through the course materials
- Attend the consultation session at the appointed time
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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.
4. BC Plan Presentation
An optional BC Plan Presentation by the Organisation BCM Coordinator 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:
- Review the corporate plan summary
- Endorse the corporate 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.
5. Next Session: Plan Development (PD)
This presentation marks the end of the development phase of the project. The next step is to test and exercise the plan.
Do You New Staff Joining or Newly Appointed as BU BCM Coordinator?
Should there be any turnover of your business unit BCM Coordinator after the completion of the project, you can send the incoming designated staff member to the next BCM course which is funded by Skillsfuture Singapore (SSG). Click on the link below to read on the courses suitable for them: Find out more by clicking:
Competency Based Training to Update Current BCM Plans
