7. Contingency Plan Distribution, Maintenance, Testing and Training

Definitions

Contingency planning committee

A monitoring, philosophy and strategy setting group, comprising three or four of the most senior managers, which meets infrequently during the year to set test dates, review test schedules and to authorise changes to the business contingency plans. The committee may also initiate changes to the plans, if necessary.

BC co-ordinator

A senior line manager with overall responsibility for driving the periodic testing, maintenance and distribution of business contingency plans, together with training of staff on business contingency issues. The BC co-ordinator will also ensure that changes in organisation structure and IT hardware/software are assessed for their possible impact on the BC plans.

Plan version control

Several versions of the plan document may be produced, for staff, internal and external providers of services to the company, staff organisations, etc.
In MSTA, several versions of the plan may be constructed and stored in the 'contents' worksheets.

Plan distribution

The BC co-ordinator is responsible for ensuring that appropriate versions of the plan are distributed to the correct recipients.

Plan maintenance

Periodic maintenance will be carried out to ensure that the plans remain relevant to the business processes of the protected organisation.

BC plan - Passive Test

The passive test is conducted exactly like a normal 'meeting'. Staff who are members of a particular recovery team, or group of recovery teams, are asked to describe how they would execute one or more business processes, using only the resources that would be available to them at the recovery location. This type of test is often referred to as a walk through test.

BC plan - Table-Top Test

A table top test is a more stringent passive test, which involves the development of a scenario. The table top test is conducted exactly like a normal 'meeting', but with external 'interference'. The BC co-ordinator follows a pre-planned test script, with the participation of people outside of the meeting room, including I.T. and business services staff. (The most realistic tests sometimes include the co-operation of local emergency services.

BC plan - Active Test

An active test requires the use of the recovery site and is usually carried out on a non-working day, usually Saturday morning. All, or most of the provisions of the BC plan are carried out, using the pre-planned recovery infrastructure and resources.

Partial Invocation

A business contingency plan invocation that does not include all of the 'recovery' resources and / or staff.