Sunday Workshop Session 1
Novice/Intermediate/Advanced

Tabletop Exercise Creation Workshop

Jim Kotowski, CBCP
J. Kotowski Ent. LLC

Session limited to 200 participants.

This hands on interactive workshop will lead participants through the entire process of creating a tabletop exercise. The primary goal of all exercises is the improvement of business continuity plans, strategies, and/or programs. The focus of the workshop includes a detailed discussion of the three main phases of a successful tabletop exercise: 1) planning, 2) execution, and 3) results.
Good planning leads to great exercises. Learn why exercises need a solid project management approach and how to define scope, objectives, and assumptions.
Examine resources and skill sets needed for the exercise and obtain management buy-in to ensure maximum participation.
In addition, participants will learn how to effectively facilitate, manage, and move the exercise forward.
Examples of presentations, charts, and other visual aids will be included.
At the end of the workshop, participants will receive an example project plan and timeline; a draft outline of an exercise script and presentation, and an assessment report template ready to take back to their offices to be used for a real live exercise.

Jim Kotowski, owner and principal BCM consultant for J. Kotowski Enterprises, LLC, is a Certified Business Continuity Professional (CBCP) who has passed the Master certification exam. He has 18 years experience in the business continuity and disaster recovery profession. This includes both the public and private sector. His diversified experience covers all business continuity management domains, including mitigation, incident management, emergency response, risk analysis, business impact analysis, disaster recovery, business resumption, COOP / COG, and Pandemic response planning.

Sunday Workshop Session 2
Novice/Intermediate

Business Impact Analysis Beginning to End

Barney Pelant, MBCP
Barney F. Pelant & Assc.

The Business Impact Analysis (BIA) project is the logical first step in the development of a business continuity program.
The project provides the business rationale for disaster recovery and business continuity planning.
A BIA can help an organization to learn their current capability to recover from a disastrous event.
Also, the BIA can help validate that the plan in place is really meeting the organization’s business needs.
During this workshop we will examine the successful methods for achieving timely desired results.
We will cover asking the right questions to learn:

• What is most important?
• Why?

This workshop will be interactive, so bring your questions and come share your experiences! This speaker will also present a detailed workshop on Tuesday.

Barney Pelant is owner and director of Barney F. Pelant & Associates. His professional background includes more than 30 years focusing on business continuity planning, disaster prevention and recovery.
He has held the certification of Master Business Continuity Professional (MBCP) from DRI International since 1997.
Pelant’s technical experience ranges from the design and development of domestic and international business centers, to the development of contingency plans to ensure their ongoing viability.

Sunday Workshop Session 3
Novice/Intermediate/Advanced

Workshop on Building a Business Continuity Organization

Tonya York, CBCP
EVault

When most people get assigned the job of business continuity, they immediately jump into the task of writing plans, conducting tests, and implementing mitigation strategies. Seldom do they try to build an infrastructure to support an ongoing and effective BCP for their organization.
This presentation helps participants first look at the corporate culture of their organization to determine what approach will work the best, and dealing with the realities of funding and culture, build an infrastructure to support the program. To have an effective program, an organization needs policies, metrics for measuring and reporting success for that the business continuity program will thrive.
When participants complete the workshop, they will have the tools to implement when they return to their organizations.
In this workshop, you will learn how to draft the business continuity organization for your company, create metrics for measuring success, create a policy on business continuity, create a roadmap for connecting into existing processes at your company, and will have a game plan for getting your executive management on board. You will walk away with the following tools: a template for your organizations business continuity policy; Metrics for measuring the progress of your business continuity program; and a BC organization for your company to manage the program moving forward

Tonya T. York, CBCP is business continuity management practice director for eVault Professional Services. She has 20 years of senior-level experience. As senior consultant at Symantec/VERITAS, York was responsible for creation, sales, and delivery of business continuity services to Fortune 500 customers.

Sunday Workshop Session 4
Novice/Intermediate

Best Practices: Self-Care Protocols for BCP and Career Longevity

Vali Hawkins Mitchell, PhD’
Inner Directions

The necessity of self-care protocols continues to be marginalized when they should be made primary. Maintaining motivation while managing the daily concerns of work and life for the “long-haul” of a career in disaster planning and BCP requires essential self-care tools and practices. Learn the basic tools to recognize and manage predictable and unpredictable workplace issues, from small to catastrophic, for use during daily life or critical incidents.
As a result of this session the outcomes for the participant should be able to:

1. Recognize emotional management styles and self-identify themselves and others
2. Monitor their own motivators for success
3. Explore and develop tools toward business and emotional skills mastery through interactive activities
4. Define and expand self-care protocols
5. Have an outcome of being able to utilize their work experience more fully while protecting emotions and essential bottom-line issues

Vali J. Hawkins Mitchell, Ph.D., LMHC, is a certified traumatologist, and holds a Doctorate in Health Education and a Master’s degree in Psychology. A Licensed Mental Health Counselor, national business consultant and executive coach, she is also an author, workshop facilitator, and adjunct faculty member at Washington State University in the Tri-Cities. Dr. Mitchell is a national diversity instructor and disaster mental health counselor for the American Red Cross and responds to local and national disasters.

Sunday Workshop Session 5
Novice/Intermediate/Advanced

The Incident Management Maturity Model

Deidrich Towne, Jr. CBCP
PPBI

Peter Laz, MBCP
PPBI

PPBI has created the Incident Management Maturity Model as an assessment tool to measure the extent to which your incident management system provides for four dimensions.
These dimensions are:

• assemble
• collect
• coordinate, and
• channel resources during an incident.

The workshop has been rated highly by more than 60 participants at earlier DRJ conferences.
It is highly interactive and the assessment is available to take home.
Attendees will walk away with extensive knowledge of the Incident Management Maturity Model.

Peter Laz, MBCP, is employed by Forsythe Solutions Group as a business continuity consultant. He has 19 years experience designing and implementing business continuity, disaster recovery and incident management programs.
He is a member of the DRJ Editorial Advisory Board, PPBI Board of Directors and program director of the New York-Capital Region Chapter ACP.

Deidrich E. Towne, Jr. CBCP is senior technical consultant for Forsythe. He has more than 35 years experience in Information Technology. He is Chairman of the Board for PPBI.

Sunday Workshop Session 6
Novice/Intermediate/Advanced

Mock Disaster Exercise

Sponsored by Sentigy

Session limited to 200 participants.

Attendees will learn how to conduct an exercise to validate their company’s business continuity plan and to improve their plan by collecting the all-important GAPS highlighted by the exercise. As new business continuity planners enter the business continuity field, it is very important that they understand how to exercise their plans. This Mock Disaster will allow attendees to see the process required to develop an exercise based on natural disaster scenarios.
The three-hour session will focus on the disaster organization, teams, participants, script writing and on the information and actions required to exercise a company’s business continuity plan. Exercises should be designed to put pressure on the participating team members to make decisions and produce solutions in a timely manner while under pressure. They will be under far more pressure during a real disaster.
This session provides seasoned business continuity professionals with some refresher information or even some new ideas when taking their company through the plan testing process. It will also give the new person just entering the business continuity field a process to follow and some ideas for creating their own scripted exercise.

Presenters will be Dee V. Halbrook, CBCP and Sean M. Ferguson, director of marketing. Sentigy simplifies complex problems by providing methodology, training, and professional services in information protection and technology. Sentigy is a trusted business advisor focusing on providing business-driven technology solutions that have a high return on investment and offer vendor-neutral solutions using proven methods, practices and Sentigy Pathways.

Disaster Recovery Journal
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