BCI - Designing and Delivering Effective Exercises

Design and Deliver Effective, Successful and Engaging Exercises that Actually Work

‍

Exercises are the best way to test our systems, to rehearse our plans, and are a chance to safely prepare our people. A key part of the Validation stage of the Business Continuity Management (BCM) Lifecycle, practicing the BCM programme is often the most interesting part of our job.  

Take this course to learn concepts and get hands-on experience in preparing and conducting exercises. It will help you practice what to do when things go wrong and build confidence and a capability that means the organization can more effectively respond, recover, take opportunities and learn from a disruption.

‍

Course objectives

By achieving this course, you will:

• learn how to develop a comprehensive exercise program and design specific exercises
• conduct and experience the exercises you will have developed
• carry out post exercise evaluations and report lessons learned

‍

What you will learn

Organizations that perform regular exercises have been proven to be the fittest and fastest to recover after a crisis. Based on the BCI Good Practice Guidelines Edition 7.0 and reflecting the current global thinking from ISO 22301 and ISO 22398, this 2-day course will teach you how to train your teams and test your Emergency Response and Business Continuity Plans.

‍

Module 1 - People Vs Paper - The value of exercises: Learn the global concepts when exercising: Test Vs Exercise, team and equipment capability, exercising within the BCM Lifecycle, supporting validation and continual improvement.

‍
Module 2 - Exercising Programmes: Understand how to validate plans over time, the function of the exercise programme and to develop an exercise programme.

‍
Module 3 - The Design and Delivery Team: Explore what teams are required, roles within these teams, additional support needed and top Management reporting.

‍
Module 4 - Setting the Aim and Objectives: Understand why aims and objectives are important and how aims and objectives influence evaluation.

‍
Module 5 - Format Options: Analyze different format types, their pros and cons, as well as the advantage of combining formats.

‍
Module 6 - Scenario Development: Develop on what is the function of the scenario, linking the scenario to the objectives, presenting and controlling the scenario and how to bring a sense of realism.

‍
Module 7 – Logistics - Documentation, Resources and Communications: Study documents required to deliver an exercise, resource requirements and communication associated.

‍
Module 8 – Delivery: Master the key stages of exercise delivery and their potential challenges.

‍
Module 9 - Risk Management: Determine the risks of delivering an exercise and how to respond to these risks.

‍
Module 10 - Evaluating and Reporting: Conclude with a post-mortem of post-exercise debriefing, reporting results, lessons identified vs. lessons learned and continual improvement.
‍
‍

During this workshop, you will obtain documentation and you will apply the concepts. It will provide you with theoretical guidance and practical experience in dealing with a variety of incidents.

‍

Who is this for?

The course is for Business Continuity and resilience professionals who are responsible for developing and delivering exercises:

• professionals who want to start training their teams and who need to learn how to effectively exercise plans
• professionals who want to optimize their actual plans

‍

This course includes

• an electronic copy of the BCI Good Practice Guidelines - Edition 7.0, valued at $90 USD or $120 CAD
• BCI Course material (modules)
• additional documentation and templates developed by Premier Continuum

‍

Requirements

For the Designing and delivering effective exercises course, no prior training is mandatory, although: 

• a minimum of a CBCI or equivalent credential with experience working in an organization in a continuity and resilience related role is helpful
• prior knowledge in any of these fields is helpful, but a participant will benefit from this training even if he has not attended other training

‍

Attestation

All students will receive an official certificate of attendance directly from the BCI after they successfully completed this course.