Senior Manager, Business Continuity

POSITION SUMMARY:  
 

The Senior Manager, Business Continuity serves as NMDP’s strategic thought leader for enterprise resilience across six core domains: Emergency Preparedness, Crisis Management, Business Continuity Planning, Disaster Recovery coordination, Radiation Injury Treatment Network oversight, and Executive Protection / Corporate Employee Safety governance. This position sets the strategic direction, maturity goals, capability roadmaps and operational expectations for these functions, ensuring NMDP continues to evolve its ability to prepare for, respond to, continue through and recover from disruptive events that could affect mission-critical healthcare, donor, patient, partner, workforce and corporate operations. The role is responsible for both strategic maturity enhancements and operational management, translating risk, business priorities, external expectations and organizational lessons learned into practical capabilities, measurable objectives and sustained program improvement. The role works horizontally across executive leadership, business units, Information Technology, Information Security, Disaster Recovery, Incident Response, Emergency Management, Corporate Security, Quality, Legal, Compliance, vendors and external partners to ensure plans, playbooks, communications, exercises, metrics and governance processes are practical, current, tested and aligned to business risk.

ACCOUNTABILITIES:

Lead Crisis and Emergency Management Readiness:

• Sets the strategic direction, maturity goals and operational expectations for crisis and emergency management capabilities that enable NMDP to respond quickly, make informed decisions and maintain command, control and communication during disruptive events.
• Defines capability roadmaps, governance improvements, executive readiness objectives and crisis management performance measures to ensure crisis response maturity continues to evolve in the right direction.
• Acts as a key liaison between executive leadership, the Crisis Management Team, business continuity response teams and affected business units during incidents that disrupt or threaten NMDP operations.
• Ensures crisis management processes include clear escalation paths, decision authorities, response roles, approval requirements, situation reporting, out-of-band communications and documentation practices.
• Provides timely, concise and actionable situational awareness to leaders, including issue status, business impact, operational constraints, recovery progress, restoration timelines, critical deviations and decisions required.
• Supports post-incident reviews, captures lessons learned, identifies root causes or contributing gaps and drives corrective actions into crisis management, emergency response, continuity and resilience improvement efforts.

Lead and Mature the Business Continuity Planning Program:

• Sets the strategic direction, maturity goals, governance model, capability roadmap and operating expectations for NMDP’s enterprise business continuity planning program.
• Translates business risk, regulatory expectations, operational dependencies and lessons learned into continuity strategies, standards, planning priorities and measurable improvement objectives.
• Ensures business continuity plans are current, operationally viable, disseminated, understood and aligned to NMDP’s mission-critical functions, regulatory obligations, business priorities and maximum tolerable downtime expectations.
• Leads enterprise business impact analysis activities to identify, quantify and prioritize the effects of disruptions on essential business functions, dependencies, staffing, facilities, technology, suppliers, data and external partners.
• Partners with business leaders to identify customer-critical, donor-critical, patient-critical, partner-critical and revenue-critical processes and ensures each area has documented, executable and tested continuity playbooks.
• Defines and tracks continuity program metrics, including completion of business impact assessments, departmental continuity plans, tabletop exercises, downtime procedure exercises and remediation of identified gaps.

Coordinate Disaster Recovery Alignment and Operational Resilience:

• Sets the strategic direction, maturity goals and operational expectations for disaster recovery coordination, ensuring business recovery priorities are translated into technology recovery planning, testing and executive risk decisions.
• Coordinates with Information Technology, Information Security, Disaster Recovery and Incident Response teams to align business recovery priorities with technical recovery capabilities.
• Ensures business impact analysis results, recovery time objectives, recovery point objectives, application dependencies, manual workarounds and business prioritization are communicated to Disaster Recovery and technology recovery teams.
• Serves as a business-facing point of coordination for disaster recovery planning needs, ensuring business units understand recovery assumptions, technology dependencies and operational impacts if systems are unavailable.
• Supports disaster recovery exercises by validating business participation, recovery sequencing, communication needs, decision points and operational downtime procedures.
• Identifies gaps between business continuity expectations and technology recovery capabilities and drives remediation through governance, planning, testing and executive risk reporting.

Provide Oversight of the Radiation Injury Treatment Network Program:

• Assist in setting the strategic direction, maturity goals and operational expectations for NMDP’s oversight of the Radiation Injury Treatment Network program, ensuring the program continues to evolve as a disciplined readiness and response capability.
• Provides leadership oversight for the NMDP-operated, U.S. Navy-sponsored Radiation Injury Treatment Network program, including program priorities, deliverables, stakeholder engagement, readiness activities and operational alignment.
• Directly manages the RITN Program Manager and ensures program activities, external partner coordination, exercises, training, assessments, communications and reporting are completed in accordance with program expectations.
• Ensures RITN products, including exercise materials, training resources, assessment checklists, standard operating procedures and program communications, are developed, maintained and improved with appropriate subject matter expertise.
• Represents or ensures appropriate representation of RITN during external exercises, site evaluations, conferences, meetings and partner engagements.
• Ensures RITN oversight is coordinated with NMDP business continuity, emergency management, clinical operations, quality, communications, legal, compliance and external response partners as appropriate.

Support Governance of Executive Protection and Corporate Employee Safety:

• Contributes to the strategic direction, maturity goals and governance objectives for Executive Protection and Corporate Employee Safety, ensuring these capabilities are aligned with enterprise resilience, threat awareness, emergency preparedness and executive risk expectations.
• Participates as part of a cross-functional governance team responsible for Executive Protection and Corporate Employee Safety, helping coordinate policies, procedures, risk reviews, readiness activities and escalation practices.
• Partners with Corporate Security, Human Resources, Legal, Compliance, Facilities, Information Security, Communications and executive stakeholders to align safety governance with continuity, emergency preparedness and crisis response processes.
• Supports development and maintenance of governance materials related to executive protection, workplace safety, threat escalation, employee safety communications, emergency response coordination and business disruption impacts.
• Helps ensure safety-related scenarios are considered in business continuity planning, crisis management exercises, executive communications, facility response activities and after-action reviews.
• Identifies gaps, dependencies and decision points where employee safety, executive protection, facility readiness or continuity response require stronger ownership, documentation or executive alignment.

Strengthen Training, Exercising and Continuous Improvement Across All Five Domains:

• Develops and leads training, awareness and compliance activities across crisis management, business continuity, disaster recovery coordination, RITN readiness and employee safety governance.
• Plans, facilitates and evaluates tabletop exercises, crisis simulations, departmental playbook reviews, digital downtime exercises and scenario-based tests for critical business functions.
• Ensures critical operational functions exercise downtime and workaround procedures rather than relying solely on documentation or table-tested assumptions.
• Monitors changes in business processes, technology ecosystems, facilities, vendors, regulations and organizational structure to ensure plans, playbooks, training and governance processes remain current and executable.
• Maintains authoritative records of plans, BIAs, risk assessments, exercise results, program metrics, remediation actions, approvals and executive reporting materials.

Manage Program Administration and Reporting:

• Prepares and manages the operating budget for business continuity, crisis management, disaster recovery coordination, RITN, executive protection governance and employee safety governance activities.
• Maintains authoritative records of business continuity plans, BIAs, risk assessments, exercise results, program metrics, remediation plans, approvals and executive reporting materials.
• Evaluates tools, templates, standards, practices, external benchmarks and maturity models to recommend strategic capability enhancements, operating model improvements and measurable goals across the five domains.
• Supports audits, assessments, inspections, customer inquiries, regulatory reviews and quality activities related to continuity, operational resilience, emergency preparedness and readiness governance.
• Leads change that improves continuity readiness, organizational resilience, decision quality, cross-functional alignment and service continuity for internal and external stakeholders.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS:

Knowledge of:

• Adheres to NMDP’s confidentiality policies for patient, donor, workforce, partner and proprietary NMDP information.
• Coaches, mentors and develops direct reports, including the BC Coordinator and RITN Program Manager, and provides continuity and readiness subject matter expertise to departmental leaders.
• May participate in emergency management, incident response, disaster recovery, crisis communication, facilities response, RITN or external exercises as assigned.
• Other duties as assigned in support of the goals and objectives of the organization.

Ability to:

• Sets a climate of cooperation and collaboration across departments, executive stakeholders and response teams.
• Able to discern operational noise from material threats, act decisively during disruption, maintain composure under pressure, clarify ownership, simplify complex information and drive timely decisions.
• Able to serve as a strategic advisor and thought leader, set direction where capabilities are immature, challenge unsupported assumptions, define measurable maturity goals, hold teams accountable, identify resilience and safety governance gaps and ensure recovery, safety and executive protection processes are practical rather than theoretical.

Education and/or Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in business administration, emergency management, risk management, information technology, healthcare administration, public health, public safety, homeland security or related field.  Equivalent combination of education and directly relevant experience may be considered.  
• 10 plus years of progressive experience in business continuity, crisis management, emergency management, disaster recovery coordination, operational resilience, risk management, incident response, healthcare emergency preparedness, employee safety governance, executive protection governance, grant-funded program oversight or related disciplines.  Experience must include leadership of business impact analysis, continuity strategy, crisis response coordination, recovery planning, tabletop exercises, operational downtime exercises, executive reporting and cross-functional governance.  
• 5 plus years of leadership experience preferred, including direct supervision, matrixed leadership or program leadership across senior stakeholders, business unit owners, external partners and cross-functional teams.  Experience in radiological incident preparedness and working with federally funded healthcare coalitions is preferred. 

Other Requirements

• This person may have to work unusual hours during an emergency situation and must be willing to be accessible during evening, night, weekend and holiday hours when significant disruptions occur.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS: (Additional qualifications that may make a person even more effective in the role, but are not required for consideration)

• CBCP, MBCP, MBCI, CEM, ISO 22301 Lead Implementer/Lead Auditor, or similar business continuity, emergency management, operational resilience or disaster recovery certification preferred.