Governance

GOV017

Maintain your business continuity programme

Actively maintain your business continuity programme. Make sure it remains current and continues to reflect your organisation’s responsibilities, objectives, and functions. 

Changes to your programme may be required due to:

  • changes in your organisation, such as a change in organisational structure
  • new functions, or changes to existing functions, such as a change in the way a function is delivered
  • changes to the requirements that support your functions, such as a new IT system introduced
  • lessons learnt from an exercise or incident
  • findings from an assessment or review.


Review your business continuity management programme

Reviews help you to evaluate your policy, plans, and processes to ensure they remain appropriate and effective, and to identify areas for improvement. Types of review include:

  • audit
  • self-assessment
  • quality assurance activities
  • supplier performance review
  • management review
  • appraisal of performance against business continuity roles and responsibilities.

 Your recommendations from the review process should focus on improving resilience.


Integrate your business continuity plans

Business continuity is not just about having a plan. It’s a process with practical steps for becoming more resilient, and proactively minimising the impact of any disruption, regardless of cause.

To be successful, business continuity management can’t occur in isolation. You must integrate your programme with the response processes of the other teams that protect your organisation’s operations — such as security, health and safety, emergency management, information management, and risk management. If you integrate these functions, you’ll enhance your organisation’s resilience.

For example, your business continuity programme can identify potential threats and proactive measures for security. And adopting risk management principles supports you to assess the risks of disruptions to critical functions.


Train your people

Training, education, and awareness are important. Ensure your business continuity processes are well understood. Make them part of your business practice and your organisation’s culture.

Select people for your response teams who have the right skills and competencies, and train them appropriately. Select and train back-up people for these critical roles. Where possible, make sure that people with critical roles do not have competing responsibilities.

Page last modified: 4/05/2022