BCB-PMD study plan

Define the scope and components of a business continuity management program (policy, governance, BIA, risk assessment, strategy, plans, exercises) and map them to the BCB-PMD domains.

Explain how organizational culture, leadership sponsorship, and regulatory context shape program design and prioritize program drivers.

Differentiate risk assessment from business impact analysis and list the inputs, outputs, and sequencing of each.

Construct a qualitative risk register for a sample organization using likelihood, impact, and velocity criteria, and justify each rating.

Identify critical business functions and determine maximum tolerable downtime, recovery time objectives, and recovery point objectives for each.

Design and document a BIA questionnaire and interview guide that captures financial, operational, regulatory, and reputational impacts over time.

Calculate downtime cost curves for at least three functions and rank them by recovery priority.

Analyze dependencies and interdependencies among functions, suppliers, technology, and people, and record them in a dependency map.

Compare continuity strategy options (data replication, alternate sites, manual workarounds, third-party arrangements) against RTO/RPO and cost constraints.

Evaluate single points of failure and propose mitigation strategies with explicit trade-offs between cost, recovery speed, and residual risk.

Select strategies for people, facilities, technology, data, and suppliers, and justify each selection in writing.

Identify strategy gaps where no cost-effective option meets the stated recovery objectives and document the accepted residual risk.

Draft plan sections including purpose, scope, assumptions, roles, activation criteria, communications, and recovery procedures.

Assign and describe roles for the crisis management team, business continuity coordinator, and functional recovery teams, including alternates.

Write step-by-step recovery procedures for one critical function that a trained alternate could execute without author assistance.

Apply document control practices (versioning, ownership, review cycles, distribution) to the drafted plan.

Define crisis escalation levels and activation triggers, and map them to decision authority.

Design an emergency response structure covering life safety, incident assessment, and transition to business continuity activation.

Draft internal and external communication protocols, including stakeholder notification sequencing and spokesperson responsibilities.

Integrate the crisis management section into the Week 4 plan and resolve inconsistencies in roles and escalation paths.

Build an exercise program with a progression from plan walkthroughs to tabletop exercises to functional and full-scale tests.

Design a tabletop exercise scenario with objectives, injects, evaluation criteria, and a participant feedback form.

Facilitate or simulate the tabletop exercise and record observations against the stated objectives.

Produce an after-action report with corrective actions, owners, and due dates, and define the plan maintenance trigger conditions.

Define program performance metrics and key risk indicators that demonstrate continuity capability to leadership.

Distinguish the roles of internal audit, management review, and independent assessment in program assurance.

Explain ethical obligations of the continuity professional, including accuracy of reporting, confidentiality, conflict of interest, and escalation of unacceptable risk.

Describe governance structures, regulatory drivers, and standards frameworks that shape program accountability.

Consolidate weak areas identified from practice questions and rewrite summary notes for each weak domain.

Re-derive the links among BIA outputs, strategy selection, plan content, and exercise findings without referring to notes.

Complete timed practice sets across all eight domains and analyze every missed item by root cause.

Build a final one-page recall sheet covering formulas, definitions, and decision criteria, then self-test from it.