3-day BCI Professional Certification Training
Last session in 2012
Tuesday – Thursday, 2 -4 October 2012
20% discount for first ten (10) registrations

This is Nathaniel Forbes’ highly-rated version of the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) prep course, intended to help BCM professionals pass the 125-question BCI certification exam. The course covers all six (6) practices of the BCM Lifecycle outlined in the BCI’s Good Practice Guidelines (GPG) 2010.

What are the six (6) BCM practices you must know to pass the exam?  Download Nathaniel’s free course brochure here, or email to Chris Tan at chris.tan@calamity.com.sg for your copy.

Click here for a copy of the BCI GPG 2010.

Because of his long experience teaching this course, Nathaniel covers all the material – plus his proprietary, real-world case studies – in just three (3) days instead of the usual five (5) days.

Why take BCI’s certification preparation course from Nathaniel Forbes in Singapore?
• Save time:  take just three (3) days instead of the usual five (5) days
• The highest-rated BCM instructor in Asia, year after year for 16 years
• More than BCM theory, Nathaniel shows you real-world examples
• 80%+ of the students who’ve taken this course from Nathaniel passed the exam
• Save money: Nathaniel’s course fee includes the USD 500 exam fee
• Watch Nathaniel Forbes’ introduction to our 3-day BCI training course
• Our No Fail Guarantee: if you don’t pass, you don’t pay again to retake
• Read the testimonials from our participants have to say about the course.  Read more... (416 words, 1 image, estimated 1:40 mins reading time)

The Singapore Crisis Response Network (CRN) provides emotional support and crisis intervention for expatriates from all countries in a crisis. Started by the Singapore American Community Action Council (SACAC), CRN meets about five (5) times a year on the first Wednesday of a month.

If you lived and worked in a foreign country, what would you want or need after a disaster? CRN is thinking about:

You can find Crisis Response Network meeting announcements on the CRN Facebook page; while you’re there, “like” them. Better yet, volunteer. Contact Suzanne Anderson to register for training or to get on the mailing list.

A Singapore building warden will probably never squirt foam on an actual fire; why train wardens to use extinguishers in an office environment? So, drop the word “fire” and instead focus your wardens on their genuinely important responsibilities: evacuate, escape, assemble and account for everyone (“EEAA”). Dr. David Chew‘s ARIS Integrated Medical delivers realistic warden EEAA training: smoke, sirens, flashing lights, hollering, lots of confusion.

Check out this video of our exercise for TENET Insurance before the Singapore IWE in September 2011.

Spoiler alert: they hid a CPR dummy in a women’s toilet stall, and timed how long it took a warden to find the ‘victim’.

Published in the Singapore Business Review, 5 December 2011 http://bit.ly/vIPCg0

I believe Singapore will eventually experience a severe earthquake. I’m not a pessimist; I’m a realist. You can’t live 400 hundred kilometers from a major earthquake fault and say there is no risk of earthquake.

The kitchen drawers in my 23rd floor Singapore home rolled open by themselves in the “tremor” from Sumatra in February 2008. That was a 7.0 magnitude earthquake. What happens after one that’s 8.0? Or 9.0, like Fukushima?

You understand that 9.0 is one hundred times stronger than 7.0, right?

As an organizational resilience professional, I imagine these consequences in Singapore:
• Civil Defense focused on high-priority locations. Ambulances simply unavailable
• Damaged office towers too risky to re-enter, and BCA inspectors overwhelmed
• Hundreds of employees and customers injured by falling glass
• Broken telecom lines and jammed mobile circuits
• Collapsed or buried segments of MRT track, and impassable road surfaces
• Damaged water, sewer and electric power lines
• Thousands of people trying to acquire drinking water
• Toilets that flush once but don’t refill
• Panic cash withdrawals from ATMs, only some of which will be functioning  Read more... (673 words, 1 image, estimated 2:42 mins reading time)

So this is what passes for thought leadership in business continuity management (BCM) these days.

The Business Continuity Institute (BCI), a U.K. professional association with global ambitions and under-exploited footholds in the growth markets of Asia, Middle East and South America, goes looking for a partner in North America. After thoughtful deliberation about the future of BCM in the 21^st century, and with all the time in the world to make a choice, they select…the Disaster Recovery Journal (DRJ), a 24-year old, American, family-owned magazine publisher and conference producer that must be the only BCM business in the world still calling it “disaster recovery,” the most-resented term in BCM profession.

BCI’s announcement says the alliance “aims to align thought leadership between [the] two organizations,” while DRJ’s press release says the alliance will “broaden and deepen discussions in…business continuity and related professions.”

That “thought leadership” bit caught my eye. When I first skimmed the headline, I mistakenly thought the BCI and the American professional association formerly-known-as the Disaster Recovery Institute International – DRII – had finally decided to stop pissing on each other’s shoes. Now, that would be news.  Read more... (2676 words, 2 images, estimated 10:42 mins reading time)

1. In 2010, 80% of the students who had Nathaniel as their instructor passed the exam on their first try. To help you pass, too, Nathaniel offers a ‘No One Left Behind’ Guarantee.  Watch the video to hear his guarantee.
2. Nathaniel packs the course with photos and case studies from his 15 years of BCM experience in Asia. You get ‘real world’ examples and sample documents you can use right away, plus the BCI’s universally-recognized theory that helps you pass the exam.
3. Nathaniel teaches the course in only three (3) days instead of the usual five (5) days, saving you time and money.
4. No other BCM certificate has the global stature and recognition of The BCI’s ABCI/CBCI/MBCI/FBCI certification hierarchy. Read what Nathaniel has written about ‘sub-prime’ BCM certifications.
5. You get Nathaniel as your instructor, an American with 15 years of on-the-ground BCM experience in Asia, not an inexperienced substitute teacher. Read some of the testimonials from his past students about Nathaniel.

It’s easy to register. Contact Chris Tan at chris.tan@calamity.com.sg, send an SMS text message to +65 9688-5000, or call +65 6324-3091 during business hours in Singapore.

Plus 5 MORE good reasons to take this course in Singapore, Tropical Paradise of Southeast Asia!  Read more... (410 words, 2 images, estimated 1:38 mins reading time)

A First Aider points at you and shouts, “Find an AED right now!” Do you know what to look for? Or where? Instructing a bystander to “Find an AED!” is accepted First Aid protocol in Singapore now. I suspect fewer than 20% of people know what an AED is.

A person’s brain dies four (4) to six (6) minutes after his or her heart stops, so your window to start CPR and find an Automatic External Defibrillator (AED) is very short. Those minutes include the time it would take you to find an AED, if one were nearby.

The Singapore Heart Foundation (SHF) voluntarily keeps a list of AED locations in Singapore (photo below). I don’t think their well-intentioned list will help you much in an emergency. Imagine you’re standing in the Ang Mo Kio MRT station when someone collapses in cardiac arrest in front of you. By good luck, you have that AED Registry list on your tablet or iPhone. Have a look at it. How quickly could you find the nearest AED?

With 2 million passengers a day, train stations seem to me likely locations for someone to collapse, but I can’t find any AED’s at Singapore MRT stations. There is no requirement that public places in Singapore have AED’s. Seventeen (17) shopping centres are listed in the AED Registry but there are at least eighty (80) shopping malls in Singapore. Twenty-eight (28) hotels are listed, mostly big, expensive ones. Just eleven (11) companies and commercial buildings are listed, out of what…20,000?  Read more... (447 words, 3 images, estimated 1:47 mins reading time)

Exercise Raffles III, Singapore’s 2011 financial sector “industry-wide exercise” (IWE), will be an afternoon tabletop on Thursday, 15 September, followed by a “validation” desktop exercise to try out an “industry-wide emergency response model” on Friday, 16 September, and a wrap-up and group hug (“post-exercise review”) on Friday, 30 September. The Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS) has contracted PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to manage the exercise. The next ABS briefings on the IWE are Monday, 22 August (only for the participants’ exercise facilitators) and Tuesday, August 23 for everyone else (the last one before the Big Show).

There will be a test for participants of online connectivity to the exercise portal – through which exercise developments will be delivered – on Wednesday, 24 August.

Click on his name if you’re wondering, ‘Who was Tommy Raffles and why does Singapore name hotels, shopping centers, boulevards, public plazas and disaster exercises after him?’

The scenario will be “multiple events unfolding concurrently, including physical attacks with the possibility of a cyber-element.” Earthquake would be a good scenario, wouldn’t it? It’s certainly topical in Asia at the moment, and Singapore has an outsized ‘it-can’t-happen-here’ attitude, always a sure sign that it eventually will. Past IWE scenarios have been multiple IED’s in the Marina District (after the 2005 London bombings), and pandemic influenza in 2008.  Read more... (383 words, 1 image, estimated 1:32 mins reading time)

I found this poster last month on a wall in a corporate training facility in Singapore.  Do you think its publishers take earthquakes seriously?  Read more... (772 words, 1 image, estimated 3:05 mins reading time)

• The poster is on A4 size (letter-size) paper, so you have to be within 60 cm (2 feet) of it to read it. The text is in a 10-point san-serif font, too small to be read easily (at least by me).
• Notice the word “tremors” in the headline. That word perpetuates the absurd – and in my opinion, misleading and therefore dangerous – official fiction here that there has never been an earthquake in Singapore. That shaking that swayed my 16th-floor apartment in February 2008 so much that the kitchen draws rolled open?  Not an earthquake. Just a “tremor.”
• The poster includes six (6) childish images by cartoonist and illustrator Miel Prudencio Ma.  He seems to be the default cartoonist for Singapore government posters. From public toilets to public parks, if a government poster uses cartoons, they’re his work.
• The sub-head is “Precautions You Can Take” for “tremors.” Quick, what precautions does it recommend? OK, take a few minutes to read it. Now, what precautions does it recommend? I can’t tell, either.
• HDB apparently recommends you protect yourself from falling debris in an earthquake with an umbrella (middle right image). If not, then why is the woman holding an umbrella to protect herself from a falling plant?

In July 2008, I wrote that Technical Reference 19 (TR 19:2005), Singapore’s proposed international standard for business continuity management (BCM), appeared to be dying a slow death and suggested that the prognosis for it might be terminal. I was wrong.

It turns out that the patient just needed cosmetic surgery. Singapore’s standards body SPRING revealed in October a new Asian face for BCM, Singapore Standard 540 (SS540). Like TR19, SS540 is a BCM standard for certification of organizations, not practitioners, but unlike TR 19, which was to be an international standard, SS540 is specifically aimed at Singapore companies and organizations.

You can buy a printed or digital copy of SS540 for SGD $47 (USD 31.00) at the SPRING Standards Shop. Here is a preview of the first five pages.

The content of SS540 is very similar to that of TR 19. The foundation matrix of policy, process, people and infrastructure considerations for each component of BCM – risk and business impact assessments, strategies, plans, testing and program management – remains the same in SS540. There are some grammatical corrections and word replacements, too.  Read more... (2603 words, 0 images, estimated 10:25 mins reading time)