Training module
Business Impact Analysis
Perform ISO 22301-aligned business impact analysis, identify critical activities, and define time-based recovery requirements
Does your business impact analysis fail to guide effective business continuity design?
This training module teaches how to conduct ISO 22301-aligned BIA, identify critical activities, and derive time-based recovery requirements for decisions.
Overview
What this module is about
Many organisations treat BIA as a spreadsheet exercise: inconsistent criteria, unclear definitions of “critical”, and outputs that don’t translate into design choices or audit-ready justification. The result is friction between business and IT, continuity strategies that are disconnected from real impacts, and plans that are hard to maintain or defend.
This training module focuses on the continuity-specific logic of BIA: defining impact criteria and evaluation scales, identifying critical activities and dependencies, and deriving time-based requirements (e.g., MTPD/MAO, RTO, RPO and resource needs) that can be handed over cleanly to continuity strategies and continuity plans. It stays within BIA scope: it does not teach continuity strategy design or plan/exercise development; those are handled in the dedicated ISO 22301 modules.
Audience
Who it is for
Management system implementers and coordinators
Executives and department heads accountable for management system performance
Those responsible for processes, policies, assets, risks and controls
Auditors seeking insight into management-side practice, not audit technique
Consultants working on management system design, governance or improvement
Decision supportIs this module for you?
It is a good fit if you…
need clear, time-based continuity requirements instead of vague “criticality”.
want consistent criteria to identify critical activities and dependencies.
translate business impact into MTPD, RTO, and RPO decisions.
align business, IT, and continuity planning on shared assumptions.
need BIA outputs that stand up in audits and management review.
It may not be the best fit if you…
are looking for continuity strategy or recovery plan design.
want to run exercises, simulations, or crisis response training.
need tool-based BIA templates or spreadsheet walkthroughs.
already operate a stable, well-embedded ISO 22301 BIA practice.
What to bring
This module assumes participants can work with management-system concepts and organisational process thinking. ISO 22301 clause knowledge is not required, but participants should be comfortable discussing service impacts, dependencies, and time constraints.
Helpful background includes:
Basic familiarity with process/service descriptions and ownership
Ability to discuss operational consequences of disruption (not risk methodology)
Agenda
What is taught
7 parts01Role of BIA within continuity design
How to position the BIA as a decision-support input that produces prioritisation and time requirements without drifting into strategy or planning design
02Defining impact criteria and evaluation logic
How to define calibrated impact dimensions and scoring rules that allow consistent, comparable continuity decisions across functions
03Determining which activities are critical
How to structure activities for analysis and apply explicit thresholds and governance rules to make criticality decisions defensible and resolvable
04Dependencies and resource requirements
How to identify upstream and downstream dependencies and determine the minimum resources required for operation and recovery of critical activities
05Time-based requirements and recovery parameters
How to derive and document MTPD/MAO, recovery priorities, and RTO/RPO needs in a way that aligns business expectations with IT realities
06Documented outputs and traceability
How to produce BIA artefacts that are sufficient for implementation and audit use while avoiding unnecessary detail or false precision
07Technology as an enabler
How to structure BIA data for maintainability and use tooling and AI assistance to support consistency checks without replacing judgement
Outcomes
Learning outcomes
01
Define impact criteria that reflect organisational objectives and stakeholder needs
02
Structure activities and determine which are critical based on impact and time sensitivity
03
Map dependencies and resource needs to support recovery requirement derivation
Derive time‑based recovery requirements (RTOs, RPOs) that drive continuity design
Produce maintainable BIA outputs that can be reviewed and updated over time
Communicate BIA results to stakeholders to inform decision‑making and assurance
Materials
The content and the assessment
Written module
The full content in writing, complete in itself. Videos are recorded for parts of it as an alternative way through, and the written module always carries everything.
Exercises
Graded work on the case organisation's own registers: structured answers checked against the encoded case, written answers scored against a rubric traced to it, with a trainer holding the final word on every assessed item.
On completion
The assessed exercises must be passed before the certificate is issued.
Scheduling
No public run of Business Impact Analysis is scheduled at the moment. Tell us you are interested and we will let you know when the next one opens, or discuss running it in-house.
Module facts
- Module ID
- HAM-BC-S-01
- Discipline
- Business Continuity
- Part of tracks
- Management System Manager
Case organisation
All modules share one company
Each module enters the company at a particular point in its history and finds it as that history has left it.
Northstar Integrated Services AG is a group headquartered in Zurich, operating in six European countries, with about 1,350 employees at the end of 2025. It provides digital operations platforms and managed operational services to regulated organisations in healthcare, the public sector and industrial services. Founded in 2008 as a field-operations firm serving business customers, it had about twenty-five employees when its first regulated customer, a hospital group, required documented decisions, named accountability and evidence on request. It moved into the platform business in 2016 and in 2024 acquired an operating business in Poland and the Czech Republic, whose legal entity continues inside the group.
Linked registers
Organisation and people, roles, risks, objectives, policies, documents and records, communications, findings, audits and reviews, interested parties, processes
Records, not summaries
The evidence sits in the registers and documents where a real organisation would keep it.
A history
The company has a timeline from 2008, so a structure can be examined before and after it changed.
More than one legal entity
A Swiss parent company and an acquired subsidiary in Poland and the Czech Republic, with customers in several jurisdictions
Why it matters
Judgement develops on material that is incomplete and partly contradictory, as it is in practice. Northstar is built that way on purpose. Because modules enter its history at different points, a governance structure can be seen while it is built, when it is outgrown and when it is rebuilt.
Delivery & dates
How this module reaches you
Delivered live online, combining conceptual framing, discussion, case work and direct interaction with the trainer. In-house and contextualised delivery is available on request.
No public run is scheduled at the moment. Most modules run on request as well as on the public calendar, so tell us the timing you need.
Want this module scheduled?
We will tell you when the next run is scheduled, or run this module in-house with your own case material.
Not sure it is the right module?
Describe your context in a short message and we will tell you honestly.