The ISO 22301 Lead Implementer course equips participants with the knowledge and practical skills to plan, establish, implement, operate, monitor, maintain, and continually improve a Business Continuity Management System (BCMS).

ISO 22301:2019 provides requirements for organizations to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disruptive incidents. It applies to organizations of all sizes and sectors.iso+1

The course typically runs for four to five days, combining presentations, practical exercises, implementation workshops, case studies, and an examination.

Learning Objectives

By the end of the course, participants should be able to:

• Explain the purpose, principles, and benefits of a BCMS.

• Interpret the requirements of ISO 22301:2019.

• Establish the business case, scope, governance, and implementation approach for a BCMS.

• Conduct or coordinate business impact analysis and risk assessment.

• Develop business continuity strategies, plans, and procedures.

• Define roles, responsibilities, authorities, and communication arrangements.

• Establish documentation, competence, training, and awareness processes.

• Plan and conduct exercises and tests.

• Monitor, measure, audit, and review BCMS performance.

• Manage incidents, nonconformities, corrective actions, and continual improvement.

• Prepare an organization for an ISO 22301 certification audit.

Proposed Course Outline

Day 1: BCMS Fundamentals and Initiation

• Introduction to business continuity and organizational resilience.

• Overview of ISO 22301:2019 and its relationship with other management-system standards.

• Key concepts:

  • Disruption and incident management.

  • Business continuity and resilience.

  • Maximum acceptable outage.

  • Recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives.

  • Minimum business continuity objective.

• The ISO management-system structure.

• Understanding organizational context and interested parties.

• Determining the scope of the BCMS.

• Leadership responsibilities and management commitment.

• Establishing a business continuity policy.

• Defining BCMS roles, responsibilities, and authority.

• Developing a business case and implementation project plan.

Day 2: Planning the BCMS

• Identifying legal, regulatory, contractual, and stakeholder requirements.

• Determining risks and opportunities.

• Establishing business continuity objectives and performance indicators.

• Business impact analysis:

  • Identifying products, services, and prioritized activities.

  • Assessing impacts over time.

  • Determining recovery priorities.

  • Identifying resource and dependency requirements.

• Risk assessment for disruptive events.

• Defining risk evaluation criteria.

• Identifying threats, vulnerabilities, and consequences.

• Selecting risk treatment and continuity priorities.

• Practical exercise: conducting a simplified BIA and risk assessment.

Day 3: Designing and Implementing Continuity Arrangements

• Developing business continuity strategies and solutions.

• Resource requirements, including:

  • People and competence.

  • Premises and facilities.

  • Technology and information.

  • Suppliers and logistics.

  • Communications.

  • Financial and operational resources.

• Establishing incident response structures.

• Defining incident escalation and invocation criteria.

• Emergency management and incident response.

• Warning, alert, and communication procedures.

• Developing business continuity plans and procedures.

• Stabilizing, continuing, resuming, and recovering operations.

• Managing documented information.

• Training, competence, and awareness.

• Integrating the BCMS with existing risk, security, quality, IT service, and crisis-management processes.

Day 4: Operating, Evaluating, and Improving the BCMS

• Operating and maintaining continuity procedures.

• Exercise and testing programmes:

  • Exercise objectives and scenarios.

  • Tabletop exercises and simulations.

  • Testing plans, communications, systems, and alternate arrangements.

  • Recording results and lessons learned.

• Monitoring, measurement, analysis, and evaluation.

• Internal audit planning and preparation.

• Management review.

• Handling incidents and post-incident reviews.

• Identifying nonconformities.

• Corrective action and root-cause analysis.

• Continual improvement of the BCMS.

• Preparing documented evidence for certification.

• Understanding the certification audit process.

• Practical exercise: evaluating test results and creating an improvement plan.

Day 5: Implementation Workshop and Examination

• End-to-end BCMS implementation case study.

• Developing an implementation roadmap.

• Reviewing typical implementation challenges and solutions.

• Preparing an organization for Stage 1 and Stage 2 certification audits.

• Consolidated review of ISO 22301 requirements.

• Examination or assessment.

• Discussion of certification and professional development options.

Practical Activities

Participants may complete exercises such as:

• Defining a BCMS scope statement.

• Drafting a business continuity policy.

• Mapping products, services, processes, and dependencies.

• Conducting a business impact analysis.

• Performing a disruption risk assessment.

• Selecting continuity strategies.

• Developing a business continuity plan.

• Creating an incident escalation matrix.

• Designing an exercise and testing programme.

• Preparing an internal audit checklist.

• Recording a nonconformity and developing corrective action.

• Preparing evidence for a certification audit.

Who Should Attend

The course is suitable for:

• Business continuity managers and coordinators.

• Risk and enterprise-risk managers.

• Resilience, crisis-management, and emergency-management professionals.

• Project managers responsible for implementing a BCMS.

• Consultants supporting ISO 22301 implementation projects.

• Compliance, governance, and regulatory professionals.

• Internal auditors and business continuity auditors.

• Information security, IT service continuity, and disaster-recovery professionals.

• Operations, facilities, supply-chain, and supplier-risk managers.

• Quality, health and safety, and integrated-management-system professionals.

• Senior managers responsible for organizational resilience.

• Members of business continuity or crisis-management teams.

• Professionals responsible for maintaining conformity with BCMS requirements.pecb+2

Recommended Prerequisites

Participants should ideally have:

• Basic knowledge of business continuity or risk management.

• Familiarity with management-system concepts.

• Some understanding of their organization’s processes, services, and dependencies.

• Experience in project management, compliance, auditing, risk, IT continuity, or operational resilience.

Prior experience with ISO 22301 is helpful but not always essential. Organizations may also benefit from sending a cross-functional group, such as a business continuity lead, risk representative, IT representative, operations manager, and compliance or audit representative.

Expected Outcomes

After completing the course, participants should be able to contribute to or lead a structured ISO 22301 implementation by:

1. Establishing the BCMS scope and governance.

2. Assessing business impacts and disruption risks.

3. Selecting appropriate continuity strategies.

4. Documenting and implementing plans and procedures.

5. Testing the organization’s continuity capability.

6. Measuring BCMS effectiveness.

7. Supporting internal audits, management reviews, and certification activities.

8. Driving corrective action and continual improvement.

This course is tailored to the organization’s sector, regulatory environment, operating model, and existing continuity arrangements. ISO 22301 implementation commonly includes management commitment, risk assessment, business impact analysis, a continuity strategy, plans, training, exercises, internal audits, management reviews, and corrective action.