Course content

You will experience Business Continuity Management yourself. With your group you have your own construction company building prefab houses from LEGO® bricks. By setting up your own company from mission, vision and strategy, through purchasing, sales and production management, to production and logistics, you discover how to optimise the continuity of your supply chain. You follow the EFQM model, the business model canvas and the BCM process model to give substance to your business continuity organisation. With each production round, we establish a baseline (the zero measurement), predict the outcomes (our hypothesis), test the extent to which the outcomes match with our prediction, and adjust our processes, plans or objectives. This way we always go through the core tasks: analysis, design, implementation and evaluation. We work in short cycles: try out whether or not something works and learn from it. As the weeks progress we move from the operational level, via the tactical level to the strategic level.

In the risk leadership workshops, you work on the skills you need to put risk management into practice. Throughout the semester you work on your own personal development. You have access to a learning community that consists of your fellow students, professionals from the field (principals and buddies) and lecturers. All assignments lend themselves to getting started/practising with your own personal development objective.

There are several societal tensions which can lead to disruptions in the continuity of your organisation. One of the assignments you will be working on puts you in direct contact with a group that polarises, radicalises, or spreads conspiracy theories, or fake news. You conduct sociological field research in which you postpone your judgement. You try to figure out why the people in the group you investigate think the way they think. What are their goals? What symbols do they use? Who are their leaders/idols? Although you may not agree with them, you will find out what makes them tick.

One week of the semester is dedicated to predictive profiling. You will learn to spot the behaviour of people with bad intentions. And you will also experience what it is like to have bad intentions yourself. Guided by an expert from the Dutch police you will attempt to hide a (fake) bomb at our university in order to make as many casualties as possible. This practical exercise is given theoretical underpinnings by pointing out the criminal planning cycle and using controlled cognitive engagement to distinguish whether or not someone displaying peculiar behaviour has bad intentions.

Both the sociological field research assignment and the predictive profiling exercise enhance your situational awareness.

During 15 weeks you do assignments and experience BCM. Each meeting, exercise, and assignment provides you with feedback as to your competence in managing business continuity. During the semester you keep a log of your activities and what you have learned. What insights did you have? How did you feel about an exercise? Did you meet your goals? Why (not)? What does this say about you? In doing so, you continuously know whether you are headed towards passing or failing this module.

Out of your activity log, you create a portfolio in which you use professional products to prove your level of proficiency in business continuity management. In your portfolio you share the examples that make you look best. Successes, but also epic failures, and what you learned from those moments, are a great way to demonstrate your business continuity management skills. Your final portfolio is graded either unsatisfactory, satisfactory, good, or excellent.

Finally, you have an assessment interview with a BCM professional and a lecturer. The interview starts with the question to describe what business continuity management entails in your own words. From that we explore the phases of the business continuity process model. Crafting your portfolio will help you prepare for this interview. And, the interview being rather important, we also practice it in a lecture. Your assessment interview is graded either unsatisfactory, satisfactory, good, or excellent.

When both your portfolio and your assessment interview are graded at least satisfactory, your final grade is the highest of the two. If one or both are unsatisfactory you have to do a resit.

In this module, we apply design thinking. Your client has a problem but does not yet know what the solution will be like. What the solution should do (the function) is clear, but how that solution does that (the form) is not yet clear. To be able to work with an action plan you need clarity about both function and form. Otherwise, you don't know what you are working towards. Design thinking is a process to arrive at a working prototype: a thing that does something (the function), but of which it is still unclear what those things look like (the form).

Design thinking is a design approach in which you work towards your end product in short cycles. You continue to refine your design and test in the meantime to what extent the solution works for your client and other parties involved. The solution is created by following the process. Every intermediate form is a prototype. During the first three weeks we guide you and your group to the first prototype. Then you will work independently to further develop and refine your prototype. Until there is finally a robust working solution for your client. The research that is needed is not linear, but short-cyclical and iterative. Like every cauliflower, it consists of florets that are a cauliflower in itself, and those florets also consist of even smaller cauliflowers. More information about design thinking and all kinds of techniques that you can apply can be found in the Brightspace course Safety & Security LAB. You take the lead with the guidance provided by the teachers. The teachers are trained to facilitate all kinds of working methods. It's up to you to make use of it.

Your group is provided with several possible assignments to dig into. At the outset of the project you prepare a pitch for three principals. The principals will choose the group they would like to have working on their project. At the end of the first week of the semester you meet your principal and discuss your assignment in detail. Using design thinking, you empathise, define, ideate and prototype in a couple of weeks. In doing so by week 3 you show your principal the first draft of your prototype. This evaluation completes the first iteration of your project. Then you repeat this process to come up with an improved prototype. You continue to develop your prototype until the 18^th week of the semester.

To give you an idea of the type of problems you could be working on, below you find some projects our students have completed in past years:

• For a Dutch bank students assessed the security implications of hybrid working. They came up with an instruction video detailing the desired secure behaviour expected from employees when working from home, during transport, or in a public location.
• For another Dutch bank students have organised business continuity management exercises. They designed the exercise, conducted the exercise at the location of the principal, and have written an evaluation with lessons learned from the exercise.
• For ProRail students provided a scenario of a total Blackout. What works and what stops working. And what is necessary to do in the first 3 hours of this disruption.
• For NATO students designed a platform and a serious game to stimulate the use of the intervention Stability Policing.
• For a Dutch insurance company students designed a tool that helps service level managers assess when to notify the crisis management team: when is an incident a crisis.
• For Dutch customs students designed scenario cards.

You complete this module by delivering your prototype to your principal. And you provide your lecturer with a document in which you explain the choices you made along the way and the theories you used to arrive at your working prototype. Your principal and your lecturer determine your grade.