Solutions Design (PP4) turns requirements from Analysis into practical strategies and solutions (for people, premises, technology, information, suppliers, etc.). Selecting workable solutions requires collaboration with the stakeholders who own the product/service delivery, activities, and critical resources, because they understand operational constraints, dependencies, performance expectations, and what “minimum acceptable capacity” really means in practice. This is reinforced by the CBCI module outline for PP4, which includes selecting strategies/solutions and mitigating unacceptable risks/single points of failure—work that depends on detailed operational input from owners.

The finance director may advise on affordability, but is not the primary partner for solution design decisions. A “department representative” is vague and may not have authority/knowledge of the specific priority activity or resource. Incident response team leaders focus on incident-time coordination, not necessarily on designing recovery capabilities. Therefore, partnering with the relevant product, activity, or resource owner (option C) is best practice and delivers solutions that are realistic, maintainable, and actually executable during disruption.