Business Continuity Disaster Recovery Project Management OPM3 Risk Assessment Training

Should Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery be treated like a project? Often, people get tangled up in the technical descriptions of what actually constitutes a project. The only way you can have a viable Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery plan is to treat it exactly like what it is. A project.

Like any project, you have your initiation phases where you determine what the stakeholders want, determine exactly what is in and out of scope for the project, and put your team together.

As with any other project, you want to spend the majority of your time in the planning, execution, and controlling phases where you make plans, test them, and revise your plans according to the test results.

You finally get to closing once you have had an actual event. Like any other project close, you have contracts to pay off, lessons learned to document, and feed everything back into the next Business Continuity project.

All of this sounds like a project to me. Especially when you add in the various project and change approval boards that are necessary to insure Business Continuity is integrated into all new projects and modifications to existing projects and processes.

Some people would argue that because Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery projects have no specific ending dates, they cannot be projects. This is case where if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and talks like a duck ... it probably IS a duck (or something related to a duck).