I am inquiring to see if anyone has any suggestions for business continuity testing, mainly for roundtable discussions or walk throughs. Any help is appreciated.

Thanks.

I think it's more interesting and realistic to use potential real-life situations.

Are you located near an airport - even a small one? What will you do if a plane crashes nearby?

Near a railroad line or a highway? There could be a toxic spill and the streets are all closed for 2 days.

Just look at the news - tornados, floods, pick one!

Sometimes I like to have mini disasters tested too.

A scenairo like the Data Processing supervisor is in a car accident and will be out for at least 6 weeks. (Some people hate to be put even in fake danger so feel free to substitute: won the lottery and quit with no notice!)
or
A fire takes out the entire 3 rd floor (4 departments) It will be 3 months before repairs and remodel are complete. No other areas are affected.

Walk thrus on a small scale can help when you are reviewing the big picture!

We just went through a process where I wrote down scenarios based out of incidents that happened in real life (Google is wonderful): derailment, tornado, hostage situation near bank, etc.

Then, for each scenario, I would have one person near the testing site who would hand out hourly updates in envelopes. That way the scenario would evolve as it would in real life, even though it may be accelerated a bit.

We literally assume our main office no longer exits. Quarterly we have a department all report to our back-up site and work from there for a morning. They are to test all programs they would need access to , have a physical supply of forms and supplies and document that they are able to perform every task.

Have you already tested for an illness epidemic? (flue or some other contagious disease) If a large number of employees at the main office or a large branch travel over a bridge - what if the bridge was damaged & could not be used for a long period of time. How about a black out, where a large majority of your banking areas was affected.

ahou, if your question is directed towards me, this is how I responded in the recent thread about pandemic testing that may answer your question:

One thing we did was take our entire employee list, which is alphabetical, crossed off every other name randomly, not considering where folks worked, saw who we were left with (50% reduced work force) to see if we had enough coverage for all areas and departments. We then took the same list of reversed the name crossing off to see the results then. It was an interesting exercise and one that could become a realty.

Another thing you could is "pretend" an entire department or branch is out due to a pandemic, what kind of cross training is in place to ensure that work still gets done.

We followed the technique used by Pizza Queen. The departments did an inventory of tasks and determined, with the employees left, what they could and could not continue to do with the staff at hand. All must be documented.

I made "cards" with happy smileys and sick smileys. Then I went to each department. If that department had 12 people, I made a stack of 12 cards, 40% of them sick smileys. Then each employee drew from the stack. The remaining non-sick employees had to be able to perform their department's critical functions. It was interesting and did not disrupt the workdays too much, the sick folks had to go right back to work.

Those are all great ideas. We did a walk-through once where a wrecking ball breaks loose from the crane and crashes into a branch. It was inspired by an actual event where a wrecking ball did break loose and rolled down a hill and into the rear end of a stopped car which in turn caused a chain reaction.

We just had our tabletop testing and we used robbery as our disaster this year. It gets difficult to find a different "disaster" each year for testing!

What is the typical documentation that you usually use. Our old compliance officer never documented the testing of our previous BCP. I am fairly new to compliance and trying to get our plan updated. Would anyone mind sending me a copy of their documentation for their testing? If so, just pm me.

Thanks,

I am working on the testing portion of our BCP and Pandemic plans. MGMT would like "Sample Test" that would be in the back of the manual that could be pulled out and "Tested".

Anyone done anything like this. I like the scenerios above and will try making these "Tests" for the book, but would like to see if anyone has anything else to share.

You can PM me if you like.

Does anyone have any documents or table top test samples that they can share?