Business Continuity Planning ─ A Project Management Approach

If a major event such as a terrorist attack, 7.2 earthquake, tsunami, or hacker attack were to disrupt business operations, would your organization be prepared to respond to the financial, political, and social impacts? In order for your company to be resilient, it must be ready to respond and recover quickly from the impact of such events. Business continuity is the discipline that can help your organization become truly resilient.

Business Continuity Planning: A Project Management Approach explains how to deploy project management, risk management, business continuity, and business preparedness methods in a manner that will ensure organizational resiliency. With an emphasis on building business preparedness plans, it covers the fundamental principles of project management, risk management, business continuity, and business preparedness.

Upon reading this book, you will learn how to apply project management to institute business continuity governance and to build and maintain business preparedness plans. You will also learn what’s required to conduct an effective business impact analysis.

Detailing a proven plan for achieving business continuity and business preparedness, the book includes numerous diagrams, checklists, and tools to help you determine exactly what you must do to prepare for a serious event. It also explains how to test your continuity plans and evaluate preparedness processes to ensure your organization will be truly prepared to withstand or recover from the next emergency, disaster, or catastrophic event to affect your organization.

Ralph L. Kliem, PMP, CBCP, President of LeanPM, LLC, has over 30 years of experience with Fortune 500 firms, including Safeco Insurance Companies and The Boeing Company. As a senior project manager for Boeing, he managed many agile, financial compliance, and business continuity (BC) projects. Some of the BC projects he managed included building, testing, and maintaining BP plans for the 747, 767, 777, and 787 programs. He also managed a major proof of concept project and preparation of the corresponding business case for a web-based business analytics software application that recently won the CIO Award for Risk Management, CSO Award for Innovation and Risk Management, the Manufacturing Leadership Council ML 100, and the Manufacturing Leadership Council Project of the Year for 2014.

Gregg D. Richie, PMP, CNP, MCTS, has over 35 years of experience in the project management and facilities management fields. He has managed or consulted on more than 1200 projects in the United States and other locations around the world, including Japan, Italy, Spain, Philippines, and Guam. He is a founding member and the managing partner for P8 LLC, which is a PM training and consulting firm that specializes in Microsoft Project implementations for small- to medium-sized companies. While on active duty with the US Navy SEABEES, he spent several years learning and implementing disaster recovery techniques, conducting drills, and being involved at some level in disaster recovery for the 1983 Marine Barracks attack, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption, and Hurricane Iniki, which struck Kauai in 1992.