A tailored series of business continuity and disaster recovery exercises tested a Commonwealth agency’s business continuity and disaster recovery arrangements and highlighted where its plans could work better together.
THE CHALLENGE
A Commonwealth agency wanted to test and strengthen its enterprise resilience framework, including its Business Continuity Plan and Disaster Recovery Plan. The objective was to evaluate how well the agency could manage a significant disruption and maintain its critical functions, consistent with Australian Government expectations and its own risk and resilience strategies. Testing needed to reach both the management team responsible for activating continuity arrangements and the technical team responsible for ICT recovery. It wanted to confirm that coordination between business and ICT teams would work under pressure. The agency also wanted to check that its critical function subplans and specialised role plans would hold up in practice.
OUR APPROACH
Agilient designed and facilitated a series of tailored desktop simulation exercises using a structured method grounded in ISO 22301:2019, AS ISO 31000:2018 and the Business Continuity Institute Good Practice Guidelines. The scenario was co-designed with the agency’s enterprise risk team to make it realistic and relevant. One session tested the management response team’s ability to activate and manage a business continuity event. Another focused on the disaster recovery team, with an emphasis on ICT recovery and technical incident response. A further session took participants through a structured walkthrough of critical function subplans and specialised role plans. Exercises were run in a hybrid format so staff could take part in person or online. Participant debriefs captured observations while they were fresh, and these fed into the final report. The scope covered exercise design and planning, coordination with internal stakeholders, live facilitation and reporting.
THE OUTCOME
The exercise series helped the agency advance the maturity of its enterprise resilience arrangements across business and ICT domains.
- Validation of coordination protocols and clearer decision-making responsibilities across the response teams
- Identified opportunities to improve integration between business continuity and ICT recovery plans
- A post-exercise summary report with findings, observations and practical recommendations to enhance resilience planning and operational response
Related services: business continuity consulting, business resilience programs, exercising and testing. Sector experience: government security consultant. To discuss a similar project, contact Agilient.