business-continuity-and-resilience
Plans for operating through disruption — impact analysis, recovery objectives, continuity plans, and the exercises that prove they work. Use this to run a business impact analysis, set RTO and RPO, write or test a continuity plan, prepare for a supplier or site failure, or answer
Install
npx skills add https://github.com/cbrock84/headcount/tree/main/plugins/operations/skills/business-continuity-and-resilience
claude plugin marketplace add https://llmmart.ai/marketplace.json && claude plugin install cbrock84-headcount@llmmart
git clone https://github.com/cbrock84/headcount.git
The skills CLI installs just this skill, for any of its supported agents. Claude Code installs the whole cbrock84/headcount collection as a plugin from our marketplace. Git is the plain clone.
Skill manifest
Business continuity and resilience
Continuity is a business question wearing technical clothing. The technical restore is covered by
it-operations:backup-and-recovery; this is about which processes must keep running, for whom, and
how long you can survive without them.
Start with impact, not systems
A business impact analysis asks, per process: what breaks downstream, how fast, and who notices. Work outward from the customer-visible failure, not inward from the asset register — an inventory of systems tells you what you own, never what matters.
For each critical process establish:
- Maximum tolerable outage — the point past which the damage is not recoverable by working harder afterwards. This is a business judgment, made by the process owner, not by IT.
- RTO — how quickly it must be back. Always shorter than someone wants to pay for.
- RPO — how much data you can afford to lose, measured in time. An RPO of zero is a claim about spending, not about intent.
RTO and RPO that were not signed by the person accountable for the process are aspirations.
Plans people can follow badly
A continuity plan is read by a stressed person at 03:00 who did not write it. Optimize for that reader: named roles rather than names, decision authority stated explicitly, and the first three actions on the first page.
Include what to do when the plan's assumptions fail — the alternate site is also affected, the key person is unreachable, the supplier is not answering. Plans that only handle the anticipated failure handle almost nothing.
Exercises
Untested plans are documents, not capabilities. Escalate the rigour:
- Walkthrough — read it aloud together and find the steps nobody can actually perform.
- Tabletop — inject a scenario and make the decisions under time pressure.
- Live failover — actually run on the alternate path, in production, with the real people.
The exercise produces findings or it was theater. Track them as work with owners and dates, and re-run the scenario that failed rather than a fresh one, so improvement is demonstrable.
Concentration risk
Resilience fails where dependencies converge invisibly: three suppliers who all sit on one cloud region, redundant network paths in the same physical duct, a manual workaround that requires a system you have just lost. Map dependencies to the point where they stop being yours, and check whether the redundancy is real or just contractual.
Sources
references/sources.md in this skill lists the outside authorities that settle the questions
here — what each one is authoritative for, and what you may do with it. Check them before
answering on anything they cover, and cite what you used. Most are free to read and not free
to reproduce; the use note on each is binding.
Tooling
Continuity and crisis management platforms: Fusion Framework, Castellan, Riskonnect, and similar. They hold the impact analysis, the plans, and the exercise record in one place, and they are worth buying at the point where the plans are too many for one person to keep current.
Mass notification: Everbridge, AlertMedia, and similar — the capability being bought is reaching people when your own email and chat are the thing that is down, which is the scenario a plan stored only in those systems fails.
Keep an offline copy of the plan and the contact list. Every organization that has run a real incident has a story about the plan being inside the system that was unavailable.
Never
- Set an RTO without the process owner agreeing to what it costs.
- Count a plan as tested because it was reviewed.
- Treat a backup as continuity — an unrestored backup is an untested assumption.
- Write a plan whose first step requires the system that has just failed.
Files (headcount)
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references
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sources.md 1.6 KB
# Sources — `operations:business-continuity-and-resilience` <!-- Generated by scripts/build-sources.py from sources/*.toml. Do not edit. --> Check these before answering on anything they cover, and cite what you used. The use note on each one is binding: most of what a professional cites is free to read and not free to reproduce. ## NIST SP 800-34: Contingency Planning Guide for Federal Information Systems NIST · US · public domain (US government) — quote freely <https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/34/r1/upd1/final> **Authoritative for:** What recovery time and recovery point objectives formally mean, what a business impact analysis must contain, and which plan covers what — contingency, disaster recovery, continuity of operations. ## National Incident Management System doctrine Federal Emergency Management Agency · US · public domain (US government) — quote freely <https://www.fema.gov/emergency-managers/nims> **Authoritative for:** Who is in charge during an incident and how command transfers — incident command structure, unified command, span of control, and the action-plan cycle. Settles the role and escalation disputes that incidents actually produce. ## OSHA law and regulations US Occupational Safety and Health Administration · US · public domain (US government) — quote freely <https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs> **Authoritative for:** Workplace safety obligation, recordkeeping requirements and the reporting windows for a fatality or serious injury. --- Sources are maintained in `sources/` upstream, not here. If one is wrong, out of date, or missing, fix it there — this file is regenerated and an edit to it is lost.
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SKILL.md 4.1 KB
--- name: business-continuity-and-resilience description: Plans for operating through disruption — impact analysis, recovery objectives, continuity plans, and the exercises that prove they work. Use this to run a business impact analysis, set RTO and RPO, write or test a continuity plan, prepare for a supplier or site failure, or answer a customer's resilience questionnaire. --- # Business continuity and resilience Continuity is a business question wearing technical clothing. The technical restore is covered by `it-operations:backup-and-recovery`; this is about which processes must keep running, for whom, and how long you can survive without them. ## Start with impact, not systems A business impact analysis asks, per process: what breaks downstream, how fast, and who notices. Work outward from the customer-visible failure, not inward from the asset register — an inventory of systems tells you what you own, never what matters. For each critical process establish: - **Maximum tolerable outage** — the point past which the damage is not recoverable by working harder afterwards. This is a business judgment, made by the process owner, not by IT. - **RTO** — how quickly it must be back. Always shorter than someone wants to pay for. - **RPO** — how much data you can afford to lose, measured in time. An RPO of zero is a claim about spending, not about intent. RTO and RPO that were not signed by the person accountable for the process are aspirations. ## Plans people can follow badly A continuity plan is read by a stressed person at 03:00 who did not write it. Optimize for that reader: named roles rather than names, decision authority stated explicitly, and the first three actions on the first page. Include what to do when the plan's assumptions fail — the alternate site is also affected, the key person is unreachable, the supplier is not answering. Plans that only handle the anticipated failure handle almost nothing. ## Exercises Untested plans are documents, not capabilities. Escalate the rigour: 1. **Walkthrough** — read it aloud together and find the steps nobody can actually perform. 2. **Tabletop** — inject a scenario and make the decisions under time pressure. 3. **Live failover** — actually run on the alternate path, in production, with the real people. The exercise produces findings or it was theater. Track them as work with owners and dates, and re-run the scenario that failed rather than a fresh one, so improvement is demonstrable. ## Concentration risk Resilience fails where dependencies converge invisibly: three suppliers who all sit on one cloud region, redundant network paths in the same physical duct, a manual workaround that requires a system you have just lost. Map dependencies to the point where they stop being yours, and check whether the redundancy is real or just contractual. ## Sources `references/sources.md` in this skill lists the outside authorities that settle the questions here — what each one is authoritative for, and what you may do with it. Check them before answering on anything they cover, and cite what you used. Most are free to read and not free to reproduce; the use note on each is binding. ## Tooling Continuity and crisis management platforms: Fusion Framework, Castellan, Riskonnect, and similar. They hold the impact analysis, the plans, and the exercise record in one place, and they are worth buying at the point where the plans are too many for one person to keep current. Mass notification: Everbridge, AlertMedia, and similar — the capability being bought is reaching people when your own email and chat are the thing that is down, which is the scenario a plan stored only in those systems fails. Keep an offline copy of the plan and the contact list. Every organization that has run a real incident has a story about the plan being inside the system that was unavailable. ## Never - Set an RTO without the process owner agreeing to what it costs. - Count a plan as tested because it was reviewed. - Treat a backup as continuity — an unrestored backup is an untested assumption. - Write a plan whose first step requires the system that has just failed.
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