Training module
Business Continuity Preparedness & Response
Structure continuity plans, define response roles and communications, and design exercises aligned with continuity requirements
Do your continuity plans look complete but fail when events occur and exercises are mere formality?
This training module helps you structure usable plans, organise response roles and design exercises that test readiness and drive improvement.
Overview
What this module is about
Many organisations have continuity plans that look complete but don’t work under pressure: unclear activation criteria, role confusion, missing dependency information, and escalation/communication steps that rely on individual knowledge. Exercises then become “tick-box” events that confirm the plan exists rather than whether it can be used.
This training module covers continuity planning outputs and operational readiness: how to structure and maintain continuity plans, how to organise response roles and communications, and how to design and run exercises that validate assumptions and trigger improvements. It assumes that BIA outputs and strategy decisions exist as inputs; it does not teach BIA execution or continuity strategy design, which are covered 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 continuity plans that work under real response pressure.
want clear activation, roles, and escalation paths.
design response structures and communication flows.
want exercises that surface gaps and drive improvement.
support ISO 22301-aligned operational readiness.
It may not be the best fit if you…
are looking for business impact analysis or strategy selection.
want detailed technical recovery procedures only.
focus solely on crisis communications or incident management.
already run mature, regularly exercised response arrangements.
What to bring
This module assumes participants can discuss service/operational dependencies and can interpret time-based continuity requirements as inputs to plans and response arrangements.
Helpful background includes:
Familiarity with core services/processes and their enabling dependencies
Agenda
What is taught
8 parts01Plans, response, and exercising in the ISO 22301 operating model
How to position plans, response, and exercising within the continuity operating model and maintain traceability from requirements to executable plans
02Continuity plan architecture and usability
How to structure continuity plans by level and design them for usability under pressure, with clear triggers, roles, and the minimum information needed to act
03Response organisation and role clarity
How to define response structures, responsibilities, and escalation paths and integrate them cleanly with existing incident, crisis, and operational teams
04Activation, coordination, and communications
How to define activation criteria, initial actions, coordination cadence, and communication patterns that support timely, controlled response
05Recovery actions and hand-offs
How to sequence recovery actions across business and enabling functions and manage assumptions, constraints, and decisions during recovery
06Exercising to validate readiness
How to design exercises that validate readiness by testing assumptions, coordination, and decision-making rather than just plan completeness
07Capturing outcomes and driving follow-up
How to capture exercise outcomes as decisions and ownership items and feed them into corrective action and improvement routines
08Technology as an enabler
How to support plan accessibility, version control, and exercise follow-up with technology and AI-assisted summarisation without replacing judgement
Outcomes
Learning outcomes
01
Structure continuity plans so they are usable in response, not just complete on paper
02
Define clear response roles, escalation paths and coordination interfaces across functions
03
Specify activation criteria, initial actions and communications steps that work under time pressure
Translate continuity requirements and strategy decisions into concrete recovery actions and hand‑offs
Design exercises that validate key assumptions, coordination and decision‑making
Capture exercise outcomes and lessons learned in a form that drives continual readiness improvement
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 Continuity Preparedness & Response 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-03
- 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.