Plan-A-ware: Elevating Business Continuity Planning and Management

Plan-A-ware is a structured Business Continuity Management (BCM) environment that supports business continuity planning and management by guiding your organization through the development, maintenance, and execution of your business continuity plan.

In today’s environment, Business Continuity Management is inseparable from organizational resilience, encompassing cyber response, supply chain stability, and workforce readiness. Plan-A-ware unites these priorities into one living, adaptive program that evolves with your business.

The effectiveness of business continuity planning depends less on how much is documented and more on how actively it is maintained and used.

While tabletop exercises help validate readiness under pressure, Plan-A-ware helps sustain that readiness over time by keeping your plans active, current, and usable.

Plan-A-ware is designed for organizations that need a practical, sustainable approach to business continuity planning, whether building a program for the first time or strengthening an existing one.

Why Choose Attainium and Plan-A-ware?

Founded in 2002 and based in Phoenix, AZ, Attainium has devoted over two decades to planning and exercising for business continuity. That experience shaped the development of Plan-A-ware as a structured Business Continuity Management environment that engages your entire team and supports swift, effective action in the face of a disruptive incident or operational disruption.

Plan-A-ware strengthens organizational and operational resilience by combining proven business continuity expertise with a structured Business Continuity Management environment that keeps your program current, actionable, and accessible.

Organizations using Plan-A-ware reduce recovery times, strengthen cross-department coordination, and maintain audit-ready documentation that proves compliance and preparedness.

Plan-A-ware is so simple that anyone with a basic understanding of tools like Microsoft Word or websites like Wikipedia can participate in building your plan. When your team members are active participants in creating your plan, they are more likely to access and implement it correctly in a critical situation.

We work with you to collect and organize the information that supports your plan, while ensuring each section reflects your organization’s actual structure, priorities, and operations. The result is a Business Continuity Management (BCM) program that stays current, usable, and ready when you need it, supported by a team prepared to execute when disruption occurs.

Our Philosophy

The philosophy behind Plan-A-ware hinges on four key concepts:

• A defined program of work, leaving nothing to chance when disaster strikes.
• Assigned responsibilities, so there is never any confusion about who is supposed to do what.
• Mentoring and guidance to give your staff the tools they need to succeed in a crisis.
• Collaboration to encourage ownership of roles and tasks for better outcomes across the board.

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”       -- Albert Einstein

Simplicity is at the heart of Plan-A-ware’s design, complex enough to manage every contingency,
yet simple enough for every team member to use confidently.

Creating a Perfectly Customized Plan with Plan-A-ware

Your entire organization needs to be involved in creating your business continuity plan. Plan-A-ware makes it easy by breaking each role and responsibility into manageable steps. A plan should be easy to set in motion and flow naturally from one touchpoint to the next, ensuring all pertinent team members are engaged and kept in the loop as the incident progresses.

Plan-A-ware is designed to help your organization easily understand the complex nature of business continuity planning and disaster recovery. Our collaborative approach encourages buy-in from your team at every level, from stakeholders and leadership to staff and suppliers.

Your plan's success can only be measured by how well your employees understand it and how effectively they can use it to guide their emergency response and business resumption efforts. Plan-A-ware facilitates this accomplishment with a high degree of staff involvement and awareness.

Since your business continuity plan is built collaboratively, every team member can fully own their roles and responsibilities. Each Plan-A-ware-developed plan is fully customized. There is no wasted time or non-essential information included; only what your organization needs to navigate a disruptive incident.

The Plan-A-ware Process

Plan-A-ware follows the proven continuity lifecycle:
Assess → Plan → Train → Test → Maintain → Improve

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This lifecycle reflects the principles defined in leading business continuity and resilience standards such as ISO 22301 and NIST SP 800-34 Rev. 2.

Your Business Continuity Plan is created as a collaborative effort between your team and ours. The goal is a fully functional plan in 5-6 months. However, we can adjust the schedule to accommodate external circumstances such as board meetings, audits, and annual conferences. We’ll wait for you to gather information and get team members on board, but you’ll never have to wait for us.

We may schedule an in-person visit to your offices or facilities to help you understand how your organization operates and what pre-existing capabilities for business continuity exist. This is part of the business impact analysis, where your plan specifications begin.

Business Continuity Plan Development

Your plan hinges on preparedness, accountability, communications, and action. Developing your business continuity plan requires clarifying your business hierarchy and collating this information into a usable format. 

Your People

Every role in your organization will be categorized, and the associated responsibilities will be defined. Clear chains of command will ensure that information flows smoothly from one level to another. Each role is assigned to the appropriate department and connected to trigger events that would directly affect that area of your business.

Communication protocols will ensure that alerts are disseminated logically, providing administrators and first responders in your organization with the information they need as quickly as possible. Contact lists will be organized to allow for interaction with different roles or to work sequentially down the chain of command to an entire department.

Each team member’s contact information can be entered once and then applied across the plan for every role and responsibility they are associated with. If one moves to a new position, their information can be transferred to the new assignment. Their replacement’s data is then used to repopulate the vacated role’s information.

Your Response

Incident plans can be developed for each potential incident. Organizational crisis response will vary depending on the nature of the triggering incident. The goal is to have the plan to cover every possible variation of the question, “What would we do if…?” (WWWDI).

For an incident that endangers team members' health and safety in a physical space, your plan must define life safety and security protocols at each location, including evacuation routes, rally locations, and building checks.

Department leaders can be tasked to do a headcount and ascertain any missing team members' location. Anyone in your organization with life-saving skills can be identified in the plan, so help can be found more quickly during a crisis.

If the trigger incident is cyber-related, an entirely different response plan may be triggered. Administration, IT, legal, and other associated teams will be engaged, and an incident response plan will be deployed to deal with the threat and prevent further security breaches.

No matter what type of crisis triggers a response, your business continuity plan will eventually wind its way through to business resumption. Ideally, the time between the start of any incident and a return to regular business operation is as short as possible. Still, your downtime could range from minutes to days.

Your recovery strategy should include a plan to maintain viability during a prolonged event that could cause extended business disruption. Examples include any incident that is ongoing and causes downtime or limited activity due to business closures, health and safety risks, or supply chain disruption, such as:

• Your facilities.
• Critical infrastructure.
• Key business functions.
• Single points of failure.
• Information technology (IT).
• Operational technology (OT).
• Human resources.

As your plan takes shape, you can create “sub-plans” with any pages in any order. You can also attach files to pages for reference, so everything is in one place (fire escape routes, CPR instruction, contact lists, etc.) When we create and customize your plan sections, we remove anything you don't need and leave plenty of room for the stuff you do need.

Your planning content is available to your team within the Plan-A-ware environment. It can also be printed in hard copy or turned into a digital document, such as a Word document or PDF, for broader organizational use.

Business Impact Analysis

Also known as Risk & Business Impact Analysis (RBIA), this process evaluates how disruptions - whether operational, technological, or third-party - could impact your organization’s ability to deliver on its mission. The insights from this analysis guide our prioritization of recovery objectives and resource allocation across your plan.

Potential External Threats

We look at your organization’s product or service, customer base, mode of delivery to market (supply chain), competitors, and more to better understand how your day-to-day processes work. Then, we build out case scenarios in which a disaster or other trigger event might disrupt your business operations.

By identifying potential threats and hazards, we build a profile of potential threats to your business continuity. When threats can be known or anticipated, plans can be made to mitigate them and maintain your operational capability.

Potential Internal Weaknesses

Next, a complete internal analysis is done to identify gaps in your operational resilience. We’ll review:

• Your facilities.
• Critical infrastructure.
• Key business functions.
• Single points of failure.
• Information technology (IT).
• Operational technology (OT).
• Human resources.

The potential threats and weaknesses gathered during your business impact analysis will be used to make your comprehensive plan.

Business Continuity Plan Management and Maintenance

Once your plan is created, it must be maintained to remain current and relevant. This process can be just as collaborative as the plan development was. Responsibility for keeping your plan updated can be shared between Plan-A-ware and multiple team members.

Maintaining a business continuity plan has always been challenging, especially keeping it up-to-date with the most current information. A team member who leaves the organization, moves to a new role, or receives a promotion can break the chain of notifications and accountability the plan requires to succeed.

Plan-A-ware makes your staff rosters, IT infrastructure, team lists, and other vital parts of your plan easier to update. Information for each person only needs to be entered once. It is then automatically propagated throughout the business continuity plan. Changing one's role “reassigns” one's data to the new workflow.

Reviewing your plan should be done regularly by the people in your organization, but who has time to schedule reviews and follow-ups to ensure they are completed? Plan-A-ware can trigger notifications to key players across your organization, ensuring the plan's content is regularly reviewed and updated.

You and your staff have access to your plan at all times. Plan-A-ware can also manage itself, continually checking for inaccuracies or discrepancies and prompting the appropriate person to review. If a prompt goes unanswered, the issue automatically kicks up the chain of command.

Action Trackers are assigned to the person closest to any information at any given time. This is based on their roles and responsibilities and connection to a potential incident requiring their involvement. These reminders can be as frequent as monthly or as infrequent as once a year. Each action should take no more than 30 minutes of your team member's time.

Examples of action items include:

• Reviewing contact information for self or other members of the team.
• Checking to ensure the correct person is listed for each role.
• Verifying chain of command and communication channels.
• Identifying new Key Business Functions and Standard Operating Processes

Plan-A-ware tracks changes clearly, making it easy to see what was updated, when it was updated, and by whom. This supports accountability, review, and correction when needed.

“Resilience isn’t built in a day. It’s maintained every day.”    -- Attainium

Plan-A-ware Support

From the C-suite to new hires, your entire team stays supported and engaged through the Plan-A-ware environment. We provide comprehensive support throughout the continuity lifecycle, from plan development and rollout to ongoing maintenance and improvement.

Our support services include:

• Onboarding and orientation: guided setup and role-based orientation so every participant understands their responsibilities within the plan.
• Plan-A-ware training: live or virtual instruction for administrators and users, ensuring your team knows how to access, update, and apply the plan effectively.
• Annual or semi-annual plan reviews: structured checkpoints to verify that contact information, recovery strategies, and resource data remain current and actionable.
• Testing and exercising support: guidance for tabletop or functional exercises to validate readiness and strengthen cross-department coordination.
• Continuous improvement and audit readiness: version tracking, automated reminders, and documentation that make compliance and audit reporting simple.
• Technical and product support: unlimited email and phone assistance for user questions, system updates, and feature enhancements.

By making your team active participants in plan development, training, and review, Plan-A-ware builds long-term ownership and accountability. The result is an organization that stays prepared, resilient, and confident in its ability to respond to any disruption.

Personnel Data and Company Confidentiality

Plan-A-ware was developed according to ISO 22301, DRII, and BCI standards. Every piece of data needs to be entered only once and is then propagated automatically. Every change and who made it is tracked and recorded by the audit function, creating a history of activity in your plan.

Plan-A-ware aligns with leading business continuity and resilience frameworks, including ISO 22301, NIST SP 800-34 Rev.2, and the FFIEC Business Continuity Management Handbook. Our methodology also reflects FEMA’s continuity guidance and the Business Continuity Institute’s Good Practice Guidelines (GPG).

The Plan-A-ware environment is protected by SSL/TLS encryption, ensuring secure access for authorized users. A username and password are required for all accounts. It is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, year-round, and your plan is backed up daily to multiple dispersed locations with appropriate data security controls.

It's Time to Strengthen Your Business Continuity Planning

Analyzing risks and impacts, developing a comprehensive plan, and keeping that plan current all require both expertise and an effective way to manage continuity over time. Plan-A-ware brings them together through Attainium's decades of business continuity experience and a collaborative, structured Business Continuity Management environment.

If you're looking for expert guidance or a better way to build and maintain your plan, we're here to help. Reach out to our experts to start the conversation and explore how Plan-A-ware can strengthen your organization's resilience and readiness.

Let's talk...