T23: Opening Narrative

This is a series of useful templates that you can use to develop the  Testing and Exercising program.

Opening Narrative

Explanation

This is a sample operating narrative for a simulation. The opening narrative defines the problem faced by the organization, and provides the necessary background information for the participants of the simulation.

Opening Narrative

ABC organization is very busy this week, with many meetings relating to product launches and reporting to investment analysts.  One side effect of this is that all conference and training rooms are fully booked.

Mr David Taylor, the President and CEO, has not returned from holiday as planned, having been caught by a “coup” in progress in Manila, Philippines.  He cannot be contacted; the outside world links from the city have been cut.

Over the last few months the development of new tower buildings behind [Name of building] has involved a great deal of deep piling which has resulted in the disturbance of earlier foundation works.  Over the weekend, a series of cracks developed in the walls within the [Name of building] building which were not discovered until people came into work on Monday morning.

During the course of Monday, there were several unexplained system failures, primarily on servers, which were thought to be caused by the vibration of the piling work going on nearby. By midday, the Facilities team which had been checking out the cracks in the walls all morning, decided to call in the [Name of Local Public Authority] team along with the organization’s consultant architect, a structural engineer and the contractors from the development site. 

Despite all these activities and continuing random system failures, no decision was made by the close of the day on what was to be done about the situation and people went home as normal, leaving the experts on site.

Team leaders/deputies of business areas in [Name of building] are known to be somewhat concerned at the loss of productive time during the day.

Requirement

What measures might you have taken as the time approached to go home?

In reality, today, in your area of the organization:

• Do you have important deadlines to meet in the next working week?
• Is work-in-progress particularly significant or excessive at present?

Consider these questions individually before the first update to this scenario is announced.

Source

Goh, M. H. (2006). Testing and Exercising Your Business Continuity Plan. Business Continuity Management Series (2nd ed.). Singapore: GMH Pte Ltd.

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