Advanced Business Continuity Exercise and Recovery Strategy Training Course

Course overview

Business continuity plans often appear credible until an exercise exposes unworkable recovery times, unclear decision rights, missing supplier dependencies or communications that cannot be approved quickly enough. This advanced course addresses the gap between maintaining a documented BCMS and proving that critical services can be recovered under realistic operational pressure. Participants learn to challenge existing assumptions, design evidence-based exercises and turn test findings into funded, accountable recovery improvements that stand up to executive, regulator and customer scrutiny.

The course covers scenario design, exercise objectives, inject writing, control-room management, recovery strategy validation and post-exercise assurance. Participants work with business impact analysis outputs, recovery time objectives (RTOs), recovery point objectives (RPOs), maximum tolerable periods of disruption (MTPDs), dependency maps and crisis communications arrangements. They practise selecting the right exercise format—from tabletop and communications tests to technical recovery simulations and full operational exercises—and gain methods for assessing whether people, premises, technology, data, suppliers and manual workarounds can meet recovery requirements.

Instruction combines facilitated briefings with a running disruption scenario involving service failure, supplier outage and executive escalation. Teams develop an exercise specification, master events list, inject schedule, observer checklist, recovery evidence log and corrective action register. Each participant leaves with a tailored 90-day exercise and recovery assurance plan that can be adapted to their organisation’s BCMS, including governance milestones, owners, success measures and escalation triggers.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Design risk-based business continuity exercise objectives aligned to critical services, RTOs and MTPDs
• Build a master events list and timed inject schedule for tabletop, simulation and recovery exercises
• Validate recovery strategies against people, premises, technology, data and third-party dependency requirements
• Facilitate exercise control cells, participant briefings and executive decision-making under escalation conditions
• Create observer checklists and evidence logs that test plan usability, capability and recovery performance
• Measure exercise performance using recovery metrics, decision timelines, communications records and control evidence
• Conduct structured hot debriefs and root-cause analysis of recovery gaps
• Produce a prioritised corrective action register and 90-day recovery assurance plan

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Business Continuity Managers — who must demonstrate that plans and recovery strategies work in realistic conditions
• Resilience and Operational Resilience Leads — who need evidence that important business services can tolerate disruption
• Crisis Management Managers — who coordinate executive decisions and communications during major incidents
• IT Service Continuity and Disaster Recovery Managers — who must test technology recovery against business priorities
• Risk, Compliance and Internal Audit Professionals — who assess continuity assurance evidence and remediation progress
• HSE and Emergency Response Managers — who need to align site response arrangements with organisational recovery decisions

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should already understand the purpose and core terminology of business continuity management, including business impact analysis, risk assessment, critical activities, RTO, RPO and recovery strategies. Experience contributing to a continuity plan, incident response process, disaster recovery test or exercise is strongly recommended. Participants should be able to read a BIA report and interpret a basic dependency map or recovery plan. A laptop with spreadsheet and document-editing capability is useful for workshop templates. Prior certification in ISO 22301, specialist simulation software or programming knowledge is not required.

Training methodology

The five days use instructor-led analysis of recognised continuity standards, followed by progressively more demanding workshops built around a shared disruption case. Participants interpret BIA data, map dependencies, write injects, operate a simulated exercise control cell and evaluate recovery evidence against stated objectives. Small groups rotate through participant, observer and controller roles to expose different assurance perspectives. Facilitated debriefs convert observations into root causes and corrective actions. The final session is an application-planning workshop in which each participant adapts the course templates to a live service, site or recovery programme.

Course outline

Day 1: Recovery assurance foundations

• ISO 22301 exercise and evaluation requirements
• Critical service prioritisation using BIA outputs
• RTO, RPO, MTPD and recovery capability alignment
• Recovery strategy assumptions and failure modes
• Dependency mapping across people, facilities, technology and suppliers
• Exercise assurance criteria and evidence standards
• Exercise formats: walkthrough, tabletop, simulation and live recovery

Workshop: Participants review a sample critical-service BIA and produce a recovery assurance matrix linking objectives, dependencies, evidence and exercise formats.

Day 2: Exercise design and control

• Exercise aim, objectives, scope and success criteria
• Scenario architecture based on credible disruption pathways
• Master events list construction and event sequencing
• Inject writing for operational, technical and executive audiences
• Control cell roles, rules and decision logs
• Observer plans and behavioural evidence capture
• Participant briefings, ground rules and safety boundaries

Workshop: Teams create an exercise specification, master events list and inject schedule for a multi-dependency service outage.

Day 3: Testing recovery strategies under pressure

• Technology recovery validation against business service needs
• Alternative workplace and remote-working recovery arrangements
• Manual workaround design and capacity testing
• Third-party and supply-chain continuity validation
• Data recovery evidence and RPO verification
• Crisis communications approval and stakeholder notification
• Escalation thresholds and executive recovery decisions

Workshop: Participants run a facilitated tabletop simulation and produce a decision log, communications record and recovery evidence log.

Day 4: Evaluation, findings and remediation

• Real-time observation techniques and note-taking protocols
• Recovery performance measurement against exercise objectives
• Hot debrief facilitation and psychologically safe challenge
• Root-cause analysis using five whys and barrier analysis
• Finding classification by risk, control weakness and service impact
• Corrective action register design and ownership allocation
• Validation testing and closure evidence for remediation actions

Workshop: Using simulation evidence, teams conduct a hot debrief and produce a prioritised corrective action register with verification criteria.

Day 5: Programme integration and executive reporting

• Annual exercise programme design and coverage planning
• Risk-based selection of services, scenarios and exercise depth
• Integrating continuity, crisis management and disaster recovery exercises
• Management review reporting and assurance dashboards
• Board-level presentation of residual recovery risk
• Regulatory, customer and audit evidence packs
• Ninety-day recovery assurance implementation planning

Workshop: Each participant presents a 90-day exercise and recovery assurance plan, including governance dates, owners, metrics and escalation points.

Tools & standards covered

ISO 22301:2019, ISO 22313:2020, ISO 22361:2022, Microsoft Excel

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions