IT Management Reference Guide

This is the final installment of the four-part section that identifies and discusses the 13 cardinal steps, shown in Figure 1, needed to initiate and maintain a business continuity program. In Parts One, Two and Three I covered the first twelve of these steps. In this fourth part I discuss what many believe is the culmination of a successful business continuity program: the conducting of an operational test, or exercise. An operational exercise demonstrates clearly how well critical business processes can be restored, how long it takes to recover them, how much data is lost in the process, and to what degree business continuity plans are valid and viable.

Figure 1 The 13 Cardinal Steps of a Business Continuity Program

Step 13: Conduct an Operational Exercise

Conducting an operational exercise is one of the most important activities to do in managing an effective business continuity program. Such an exercise confirms the recoverability of critical business processes, validates the accuracy and thoroughness of plans, and quantifies the amount of time required and the amount of data potentially lost in recovering from a disastrous event. The term 'exercise' is often used in preference to that of 'test' to emphasis the fact that the activity is not designed to be a Pass or Fail test. The recovery exercise intended for planners to learn about, build upon, and make improvements to their overall recovery strategies.

There are 12 key elements of an operational exercise and these are shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2 The 12 Key Parts of an Operational Exercise

1. Executive Sponsorship – There needs to be one or more executive sponsors who will engage in a number of activities. These include: support the exercise, provide necessary resources (human and otherwise) for the planning and execution of it, offer direction and clarity, resolve competing priorities and other conflicts, finalize the scope of the exercise, assign key roles and generally keep the project moving forward. Executive sponsors usually come from IT, from Risk Management (or to whomever business continuity reports), and from the business unit whose critical processes are being recovered in the exercise.
2. Objectives – Executive sponsors and exercise planners should identify and reach consensus on the specific objectives of the exercise. Objectives should include recovering specific business processes and applications within expected timeframes, normally referred to as recovery time objectives (RTOs).
3. Scope – Scope describes which business processes and software applications will be included in the exercise, and which will be out-of-scope. In my experience, these two lists change frequently during the first few weeks of planning as needs and urgencies of the business community become better known.
4. Assumptions – Assumptions help to clarify which parts of the infrastructure will be thought of as being up or down during the exercise. These include such items as data network segments and voice networks. Other common assumptions involve whether all testing will be done from home or at work, and that at no time during the exercise will the production environment be impacted.
5. Participants from Technical Units – The list of participants from the technical units should include system administrators, systems engineers, database administrators, application support, network engineers, appropriate suppliers and other technical support personnel.
6. Participants from Business Units – The list of participants from the business units should include all testers, observers, and optionally, executive sponsors.
7. Action Items – Throughout the planning and preparation process, numerous action items will come up. These should all be identified, assigned, scheduled (meaning realistic and committed to completion dates) and tracked.
8. Technical Recovery Plan – The technical recovery plan is one of the most important documents produced during the planning of an operational exercise. This document prescribes the exact sequence of tasks needed to recovery systems, databases, network segments and other infrastructure components. The document should also contain task dependencies (both predecessor and successor), estimated start and end times and the resulting durations. Durations times are essential to estimate the total expected recover time for each business process. Figure 3 shows a recovery plan template I have used several times to track these measurements.
9. Attendance Roster – Not all exercise coordinators keep track of attendance at planning meetings, but I find the practice helpful. I usually construct a color-coded, alphabetically sorted matrix with green indicating attendance or call-ins (we use teleconferencing a lot), yellow meaning that someone represented a person who could not attend, and red indicating absence. These color-coded charts help to spot trends and seem to encourage greater attendance.
10. Observations/Issues – All of the diligent planning should come together on the day of the exercise, and anything noteworthy observed during the actual exercise should be recorded. Major issues may need to be escalated and tracked in detail, and the final status of each objective should be noted here.
11. Lessons Learned – Within a few days after the exercise, its coordinator should conduct a lessons learned session to identify what went well and in which areas improvements could be made. All key participants should attend this session including business unit testers. The specific mechanic of conducting such a session can be found in Part 3 of "Conducting an Effective Table Top Exercise" under Business Continuity Management of this Guide.
    

    Figure 3 Technical Recovery Plan Tem

12. Final Report – The last activity of an operational exercise is to document the entire process, results and lessons learned in a final report. There should be a one or two page executive summary at the beginning that encapsulates the major findings and recommendations of the exercise.

Summary

This concludes the four-part series on developing a successful business continuity program. The 13 steps discussed in these segments cover all of the major areas one needs to address to ensure the effective recovery of critical business processes within an enterprise.