Ensuring continuity in the face of change
"During remodeling, sales continue as usual." Who doesn't know it; it's the short explanation of Business Continuity Management (BCM). Ensuring that normal business operations continue during impactful changes. A renovation creates noise and dust, but you don't want it to affect customers so much that they stay away. So you make an impact analysis in advance and determine what measures are needed to mitigate these kinds of risks.
What is continuity management?
In general, the core idea behind continuity management is to increase a company's resilience to identify risks in advance, plan for emergencies in order to prevent or mitigate operational disruptions.
Why focus on continuity management?
Your first concern is that business can continue as usual. You don't want to miss revenue or lose customers. If you have to close your store for three weeks, your customers will store elsewhere and discover new suppliers they would never have come to otherwise.
Continuity management also makes your organization nimble to handle failures and setbacks. If you know in advance what risks you face, you can make a plan to deal with them. That way you can get through a crisis faster and be "back on track" again.
You can also think about the importance of your employees. Continuity plans can ensure employee safety during emergencies, such as a fire or extreme weather.
Your customers, suppliers and investors also benefit when you have your continuity in order. It gives them confidence that you will not be idle unnecessarily when a major disruption occurs.
In some industries, continuity management is even mandatory to meet legal or contractual requirements.
So plenty of reasons to take continuity seriously and plan for it.
Unplanned and planned continuity
As a company, you can create continuity plans for unplanned situations. For example, a bank continuously backs up transaction data so that it can switch to a secondary system if the primary IT infrastructure fails. A logistics company plans alternative distribution routes and cooperation with other carriers in advance so that deliveries can continue even if a severe storm closes certain routes.
In addition to unplanned risks, there are also planned situations in which risks play a role. Specifically, this is the case with change management. Continuity management (BCM) and management of change (MOC) are often inextricably linked. Every major change generates risks that it is wise to identify and mitigate in advance.
Identifying and mitigating risks is a process that you need to organize properly. After all, mitigating risks usually means taking control measures. Those measures must be implemented and only when you are certain that that has been done sufficiently can you speak of a mitigated risk. Sometimes it is not possible to mitigate risks one hundred percent, in which cases you would like to know what your residual risk is.
Processes such as risk identification, implementing management measures and checking whether measures are implemented require a professional approach. In that approach, the right software can support you to visualize and manage risk and continuity management. The ISO2HANDLE platform offers you all the possibilities to manage these matters properly.
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