Exercising for Excellence

Interesting article on Continuity Central.

Three surveys published recently show that plan testing is not what it might be.

* A survey of 200 companies with between 250 and 999 employees by Vanson Bourne found that, of the 81 percent of respondents stating that they had a business continuity plan, 50 percent had only partially tested plans and 18 percent had not tested any aspect of their plans.

* A PricewaterhouseCoopers survey found that almost half of disaster recovery plans have not been tested in the last year.

* According to the Chartered Management Institute’s 2008 business continuity survey, 33 percent of organizations with a business continuity plan still do not undertake any form of exercise to test their plan.

The article then goes on to pose various questions to BC professionals as to why this is the case. The answers are interesting and illuminating and you should check them out. Many say it’s too daunting / costly / or just plain difficult to stage a plan test. Read the full article here

The Lizard can immediately come to the rescue with the following advice. Go on to the British Standards website and buy ‘Exercising for Excellence’.

If you have responsibility for planning and delivering exercises to test your organisation's incident management capability, then this book is for you.

Written by Crisis Solutions and published alongside the new BSI standard, BS 25999, Exercising for Excellence is available to buy here: British Standards Bookshop