OUT NOW: Business Continuity Exercises: Quick Exercises to Validate Your Plan

Nov 6, 2020

Charlie discusses what his new book contains and how it can be useful for your organisation.

This week I received the first copies of my book and I thought that I would share with you what it contains, so that you will want to take the plunge and buy it!

The book contains 18 exercises which can be run in under an hour. The concept being that it is difficult to get people together for a half day exercise, but a lot easier to get them together for an hour. Doing shorter exercises more often, leads to organisations and staff being better prepared for managing an incident than if they were to conduct a longer exercise periodically.

The book contains all the practical instructions for you to run the exercise and includes hands-on information, rather than theory.

The book is not just for business continuity professionals, but is equally relevant for resilience teams, cyber, emergency planning, first responders and community resilience professionals.

The book contains the following:

  • An 8-step process for planning an exercise. This process could be used for planning any exercise.
  • How to run a ‘plan work through’ – which I have seen mentioned a lot, but how to carry it out is never actually written down.
  • How to ‘speed exercise’ – which is an exercise one person can run with up to 40 people, with minimal preparation.
  • There are 18 exercises in total, which cater for all levels, from the strategic/crisis team to people at the sharp end responding directly to an incident.
  • Three of the exercises show you different ways to debrief and exercise, including an explanation on how to conduct a ‘structured debrief’.
  • There is a chapter on writing post-exercise and post-training reports.
  • Information on the role of umpires in exercises.
  • How to choose an exercise scenario and a 20-page list of exercise scenarios you may want to use.

I have hopefully written something practical and hands-on which people will find useful and will help their organisation exercise more often and be prepared to manage any incident.

We are hoping to release the details of a one-day training course based on the book soon.

The book is available to purchase via our website here.

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