Sentinel
Consulting

Sentinal Consulting

Sentinel Consulting Services Cover:

  • Business Impact Analysis
  • Business Continuity Plans
  • Disaster Recovery Plans
  • Exercises and Tests

 

Customize Proposal Based On Customers

Sentinel BCM’s President, Jason Firlotte, has been providing industry leading, high quality consulting and professional services in the critical areas of Business Continuity and Information Technology Continuity and Disaster Recovery planning since 1997.

Sentinel BCM has adopted the standards of several organizations as a basis for our business continuity and disaster recovery planning practice.

The organizations we belong to and adhere to as our sources of best practices are:

  • Disaster Recovery Institute International – Professional Practices for Business Continuity
  • Business Continuity Institute- Good Practice Guide

Drawing from the body of knowledge from these organizations we have developed a methodology for our practice that encompasses the entire scope of recovery planning including Governance, Emergency Response, Project Management, Business Impact Analysis resulting in practical documentation practices and a strong belief in the need to Test and Maintain the plans that are derived from this process.

The needs of each organization are unique. We endeavor to tailor our approach to suit your unique needs

 

Approach

Project Initiation and Project Planning

We will provide the following functions:

  • Coordinate, organize and manage the project planning process.
  • Oversee the project through effective control methods and Change Management
  • Refine and update the existing Project Plan if required
  • Define and recommend project structure and management
  • Manage the Planning Process

 

Overall Project Management

We manage all projects according to best practices and procedures, with steps including:

  • Establish business continuity plan project goals, tasks, resources, time schedules, and critical success factors
  • Execute generally accepted responsibilities of a business continuity planning project manager:
    • Define the business continuity planning project
    • Assess the business continuity planning project risk
    • Organize the business continuity planning project
    • Monitor and manage the business continuity planning project activities
    • Track and report the business continuity planning project progress
    • Manage change associated with the business continuity planning project

Requirements Gathering

We will work with you to collect information about the services provided by your organization, identifying the impacts resulting from a disruption. The result of the data gathering process is to define the critical business functions, their maximum allowable downtimes, and operational requirements. We will establish which business functions are critical, their recovery priorities, and dependencies, so that recovery objectives can be set.

Steps of this phase include:

  • Identifying the organizations Critical business functions and associated supporting assets, resources and technology
  • Determine impact of a disruption
  • Identify critical services and recovery priorities
  • Coordinating information collection
  • Reviewing data for accuracy and completeness
  • Providing ongoing support
  • Prepare critical services report

 

Planning

We will work with you to build useable, easy-to-maintain business continuity plans.

  • Determine Governance and response structure
  • Determine viable recovery strategies
  • Identify Standard operating procedures
  • Engage critical service owners
  • Identify internal and external contacts

 

Plan Maintenance

Develop and implement plan maintenance, and exercises processes, to ensure that plans remain up to date, and plan owners and participants are familiar with their roles and responsibilities.

  • Develop BCP Plan Maintenance & Update process
  • Develop Exercise and testing process
  • Incorporate into BCP documents

 

BCP Plan Exercise

Annual testing of BCM Plans is a de-facto industry best practice.

The new Business Continuity plan will be exercised using the process outlined below:

  1. Develop a plan which will set out:
    1. Exercise objectives and scope
    2. Exercise scenario
    3. A list of participants and their roles and responsibilities
    4. Suggested exercise date and agenda
  2. Schedule and conduct the Business Continuity exercise. The focus of this exercise will be plan activation, event response management and communications.
  3. Document the results of the exercise. Prepare a lessons learned report and after action plan to close any gaps or deficiencies in the business continuity plan uncovered during the exercise.
  4. Submit a summary lessons learned report for the exercise to the BCM program governance structure for their information and direction.
  5. Update all plans and implement all improvements dictated by the lessons learned from each exercise and test.