In-depth BC Workshop

[Susan Harris]

Greetings everyone - many thanks for all the feedback we received after 
the Disaster Recovery Summit in May.  You'll be glad to hear that we've 
been working to provide a new, in-depth workshop that will take you 
step-by-step through the process of developing a Business Continuity plan. 
Titled "Principles of Business Continuity Planning," the two-day, hands-on 
workshop will cover four main subject areas in depth:

  Disaster Response and Management
     - Raising awareness
     - Writing effective escalation and communication protocols for
       responding to crises
     - Defining disaster levels and writing disaster declaration procedures

  Risk Assessment
     - Assessing threats and vulnerabilities
     - Reducing the number and probability of risks
     - Assessing the impact of  outages
     - Setting recovery time and recovery point objectives

   Recovery Strategy Assessment
     - Evaluating options for systems recovery
     - Managing stakeholder expectations
     - Reducing the time needed to recover
     - Writing cost benefit analyses

   Recovery Planning
     - Minimizing errors and the introduction of additional risks during
       recovery
     - Creating disaster recovery plans and procedures
     - Creating recovery testing strategies
     - Planning and managing recovery tests

The workshop is specifically tailored for staff responsible for disaster 
recovery planning, and is limited to 25 participants.  The sessions 
include lectures and hands-on practice in preventing, mitigating, and 
recovering from catastrophic incidents.

The workshop will be held at the MITC building in Ann Arbor on 
Thursday-Friday, December 8-9.  Our facilitator will be Gretchen Grey, who 
established one of U-M's principal Disaster Recovery Business Continuity 
programs and was a core participant in the May Disaster Recovery Summit. 
Gretchen's biography is appended at the end of this message.

In order for us to move forward with the final arrangements, we need your 
feedback on the number of organizations/participants who will register and 
attend the workshop.  Please let us know if you.re interested by Friday, 
September 9, with an estimate of the number of people attending from your 
organization. Registration opens in late September.

If you have any questions or need additional information, feel free to 
contact me (srh@merit.edu, 734-936-2100) or Elwood Downing (ejd@merit.edu, 
734-936-2040).

Hope you can join us!
--------------------------------
 Hands-on two-day Workshop: Principles of Business Continuity Planning

    Thursday-Friday, December 8-9, 2005
       9:00 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Thursday
       8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Friday

    MITC Conference Center, Ann Arbor

    2-Day Workshop/Registration Fee: $600

About the Facilitator
---------------------------------
Gretchen Grey has over fifteen years of professional IS experience in a 
wide range of sectors and industries, including ten years of project 
management practice. Gretchen has spent the last three years establishing 
a Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity program for a large IT 
department at the University of Michigan, and earned the award of 
Certified Business Continuity Professional (CBCP) by Disaster Recovery 
Institute International (DRII). She is an active member of the Disaster 
Recovery Journal's Editorial Advisory Board's Generally Accepted Business 
Continuity Practices Committee. This committee, made up of partner 
organizations (ARMA, DRII, FSTC and NFPA) and members from the public and 
private sectors, is working to create nationally and globally accepted 
Business Continuity guidelines.