Author: Jim Mitchell

An enterprise disaster recovery invocation may activate 100’s of plans, incorporating 10’s of thousands of tasks and 100+ responders collaborating over 72 hours to achieve effective service restoration. One of the challenges for the Incident Commander is scheduling resources for achieving the desired RTO.  Based on the resource allocation done in the planning phase, the […]

An enterprise disaster recovery invocation may activate 100’s of Plans, incorporating 10’s of thousands of Tasks and 100+ responders collaborating over 72 hours to achieve effective service restoration. One of the challenges for the Incident Commander is sequencing Recovery Plans & Tasks, to achieve the lowest Recovery Time.  If Planners have tools to simulate plan […]

A new finish for your old car may look great, but in the end, it may still be a ’71 Pinto.  The cost of the BIA process – writing, distributing, validating, analyzing, reporting, presenting to Management, revising and repeating annually – can be a staggering amount.  Yet a BIA may be no more valuable than […]

Passengers on the Titanic didn’t think it could sink.  When it did, there wasn’t room for everyone in the lifeboats.  By slavishly tying your BCM program to industry ‘standards’, you may find yourself adrift during a business disruption.  Standards are only guidelines.  They’re no substitute for the knowledge necessary when disruptions occur. BCM industry standards […]

This is the final installment of our 5 part blog series exploring the value of an Incident Management Framework within a Business Continuity Management program.  This installment – the 4th P – focuses on Program Management: Building an effective Enterprise-wide Business Continuity program requires much more than BIAs and some Plans.  Successful implementation of an […]

Previously, this series focused on Planning & Plan Development- the first 2 of the 4Ps of the Incident Management Framework-. This blog explores the 3rd P: Preparedness. Planning enables Plan development.  Plans should help carry out those strategies in response to outages.  But Plans should not be the end-state of a BCM program. The next […]

(This is Part 3 of a multi-part blog examining the “4Ps” of Incident Management Framework) The previous blog in this series focused on Planning.  One of Planning’s critical outcomes should be identification of critical products and services – and what strategies are likely to successfully restore or resume each service. In their simplest terms, Plans […]

(This is Part 2 of a multi-part blog examining the “4Ps” of Incident Management Framework) Before creating Business Continuity plans, an important Planning process must occur.  This Planning process helps identify criticalities (ranking or tiers – including dependencies) and impacts on Reputation, Customers and Regulatory requirements.  Planning results should also unearth gaps, vulnerabilities and single […]

Business disruptions that can’t be contained using Standard Operating Procedures (SOP’s) can be classified as Incidents.  An Incident may cause Disaster Recovery and/or Business Continuity Plans to be invoked. Those invoked activities are an Incident Response. Think of Incident Response in three distinct parts: Activation. Knowing which Plans to invoke requires an Assessment of what […]