Photo courtesy of blog.abn.org.au

Many of the readers of this website belong to emergency management and business continuity planning teams.  And, hopefully, those disaster preparedness focused teams are testing their emergency, continuity and disaster recovery plans regularly.

But if not, or if those risk management centered groups are looking for some useful information to assist the testing of those BC/DR plans, then, an article written by Jim Satterfield is a valuable resource to turn to when you need content and reasons to convince your fellow BC/DR team members – or even upper management — that funding and support is justified to test your plans.

As Satterfield says, “Everyone has a role in a crisis. Some are strategic, some are tactical. How decisions are made in a crisis is critical to the outcome. Because of this, the following holds true:

1. Practicing emergency response helps assure that the response can proceed predictably during a crisis or disaster;
2. Participation in exercises familiarizes everyone with the vulnerabilities, impacts, plans, mitigation strategies, incident management and crisis communications;
3. Testing allows problems or weaknesses to be identified and used to stimulate necessary and appropriate changes; and
4. Errors committed and experience gained during testing will provide valuable insights and lessons learned that can be factored into the planning/updating process.”

The full posting by Satterfield is in two parts, so be sure to read the entire posting, and, if applicable, pass this info on to those associates in your organization or even those disaster recovery and first responder teams in your community’s Emergency and Crisis Management Response areas.  And if your organization is in the private sector, please get this info to in-house team members of the PS-Prep strategy planning leaders.

Click here to read Part 1 and Click here  to read Part 2 of Satterfield’s postings.