Plan Development

At CSI our plan development phase consists of three distinct activities.  Team development and training is a joint effort involving your staff and our consultant.  Plan documentation entails the formulation and writing of recovery plans.  Our consultants perform this task and work closely with your Project Leader. CSI uses Microsoft tools for the development of project documentation.  Other tools may be used upon special request.

Team Development

Recovery teams form the backbone of your recovery program.  Therefore, our consultant works  closely with your staff to develop recovery team structure.  We identify each team’s function within your overall recovery program.  We work with your Project Leader to perform the following additional tasks:

Ø        Identify team responsibilities and resource requirements

Ø      Define notification steps and procedures

Ø      Assign team leaders, members and alternates

Ø       Identify resources and procedures, including alternate resources and methods

Team Training

Team training ensures that your recovery team members are familiar with the program and their respective roles and responsibilities.  Our consultant works with your Project Leader to develop a training program that is tailored to your recovery team structure.  Team training also includes:

Ø      Individual contact sequence

Ø      Notification procedures

Ø      Individual roles and responsibilities

Ø      Documented procedures and support requirements

Ø      Recovery task sequencing and scheduling

Ø      Building awareness of emergency response

Plan Documentation

In the plan documentation step, we bring the research, analysis, strategies, procedures and recovery team assignments together.  Our consultant organizes all the information and writes your recovery plan  We are able to write a plan using many of the leading business continuity plan writing software packages on the market.  Your recovery plan documentation will:

Ø      Detail the entire emergency response/crisis management process

Ø      Contain contact information and notification procedures

Ø      Detail tasks and responsibilities

Ø      Identify critical operations functions and/or computer applications and how they will be covered

Ø      Specify computer recovery configuration requirements

Ø      Specify off-site storage strategy for your data and vital documents

Ø       Detail recovery task sequence and functional interdependencies

Ø      Identify everything that might be needed to perform part of the process: teams of people, equipment, transportation, support items, support providers, etc.

Ø      Contain all procedures that might be used in the process

Ø      Contain a list of all vendors and service providers you will need to support your recovery strategies

Ø      Contain standard forms, supplies and documents  

Depending on how your computing environment is designed and configured, what types of recovery strategies are in place or how your organization is structured you may need to consider developing custom scenario based plans.  At CSI we plan for a worst case scenario first and believe other segregated outages or other specific scenarios may be resolved or recovered from based on the worst-case scenario information in the business recovery plans .

Pandemic and Succession Planning is available.  

“User Access and Backing up the Recovery Plan”

If you need even greater flexibility, our consultants may build your recovery plan in custom-built web-based files that integrate word processing templates and a database.   

Ø      Your plan files are accessible on your organizations disc

Ø      We customize the templates for your organizations specific needs 

Ø      We customize the database to fit your needs  

Note: CSI does not guarantee the security of files used via internet or remote access. 

However we can work with your security / IT systems support personnel to protect data

collection and planning information.  

CSI may recommend the use of software by  www.strohlsystems.com who was recently

acquired by Sungard for the development of plan documentation.  We recommend this

package at times to large organizations with many people working  in a specific business

continuity department or organizations wanting encrypted file access to comply with file

transfer regulations.  The secure web-based engine and depth of the planning tool may be

a best recommendation for security and business continuity planning.  The fee structure for

this software varies.

CSI planning templates are free for use with any CSI consulting effort.  Clients on

(CASP) or plan maintenance receive the benefit of plan enhancements.