Assignment

At least 220 words for each question and two APA academy sources for each questions. Make sure you provide ideas are nearly always important and provide one or more major insights as well as providing a fruitful direction for the lesson. Arguments are well substantiated and persuasively presented. USE YOUR OWN WORDS

Question 1

We begin the jigsaw puzzle known as Business Continuity Planning. Business Continuity Planning can be a fascinating subject. The Business Continuity Planner becomes the one individual in an organization that develops the complete overview of the mission and functionality of organization and its parts. A good planner is one part investigator, one part creative thinker, one part teacher, and one part historian.

Business Continuity is risk analysis, emergency preparedness, pandemic planning, crisis management and much more. As a planner, you learn to see into the future and start to prepare for potential, probable, and unavoidable events. A good Business Continuity Planner integrates the principles of preparedness into their personal lives as well as their professional lives.

Please respond to at least one, but preferably both, of the following questions, starting a separate thread for each original response. Remember that participation at minimum levels will not earn maximum scores.

a). Regarding your personal/family resilience, do you have emergency preparedness and resilience plans for your own family or household? For how long, and for what kinds of events or scenarios have you planned? Are you prepared for scenarios such as power outages lasting several days, the need to evacuate, pandemic diseases or loss of your residence? How could you better prepare to be more resilient? How do households that have planned and prepared contribute to resilient communities?

b). Many companies exhibit the characteristics of resilience, or have proven to be resilient despite disasters or critical incidents. Identify a company or organization that you are familiar with or from your own research that demonstrates resilience, or has proven to be resilient following some disaster. What are/were the key characteristics or actions that made them resilient?

Question 2

a. Review the list of critical infrastructures attached under the Week 1 folder.

If you were doing a risk assessment, which one(s) would you designate as the most important, or the highest priority? What criteria or basis would you use to determine that? If you changed the criteria, how would that affect your prioritization of the infrastructures?

b. Factoring likelihood into risk assessments presents a variety of complications, as the lecture points out in several places. One skill that risk managers need is to be able to convince others that low frequency or low probability events can still cause catastrophic, high-impact consequences, and that options for dealing with such events may call for implementing additional safeguards, or to avoid the risk entirely.

Find a news story about a high-impact, low-frequency disaster or catastrophe (other than the 9/11 attacks or Hurricane Katrina), and describe the costs of that event, and what mitigation strategies should have been used to reduce or avoid the negative consequences.

Question 3

School or campus violence--including horrific incidents at both K-12 schools like Columbine and Sandy Hook, and higher education institutions like Virginia Tech--has plagued the United States in recent years, generating intense media coverage. It has also become an urgent homeland security issue.

There is one question this week:

1). Identify and discuss three causes for this growing problem of school/campus violence, and identify risk management or mitigation measures that seem to have worked, or which seem to have strong potential for preventing or reducing violence and saving lives.

Campus Attacks

https://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/campus-attacks

Report to the President on Issues Raised by the Virginia Tech Tragedy

http://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2007/June/vt_report_061307.pdf

Question 4

The Comprehensive Preparedness Guide (CPG) 101 discusses a variety of pitfalls communities often face in planning. Choose a specific community, organization or type of organization you are familiar with, and describe various pitfalls that might be encountered or represented in its plans or planning processes.

Question 5

Your discussion should focus on a real organization in your life--your employer, school, or faith-based or other nongovernmental organization that you may serve as a volunteer, or that you are otherwise familiar with.

There is one overall multi-part question for this week, which may be addressed in a single original response:

• Does your organization conduct drills and training? For what particular kinds of disasters, crises, or critical incidents? Have you found the drills or training useful?

• Are the drills always scheduled and announced in advance, or are there "surprise," no-notice drills and exercises?

• Are there "injects" of new information or changes in the original scenario to challenge the participants?

• Are there types of incidents for which there are currently no drills or training, but you think should be done?

• After drills or training, are after-action or lessons learned reports prepared, or meetings held to evaluate the results and develop action or improvement plans?

• What improvements would you recommend?