Business Continuity Awareness Week 2019 - Article 3

Business Continuity Awareness Week (BCAW) is an annual global event that is facilitated by the Business Continuity Institute (BCI). BCAW is a key vehicle to raising the awareness of the profession and demonstrating the value effective business continuity management can have to organisations of all types and sizes.

The theme for BCAW 2019 is “Investing in Resilience”. This can take the form of investing in people, training, looking ahead and investing in the future. In this context, ContinuityMauritius, subsidiary of BIRGER., is publishing a series of 5 articles from 13 to 17 May 2019.

The third article is Assigning the right people to the right roles is critical in achieving Business Continuity Management (BCM) goals, taking into consideration the roles and responsibilities of people in an organisation.

Many organisations fall short in this area. When doing a Business Continuity Plan (BCP), a limited attention is given to the roles and responsibilities of people in an organisation. In any BCP there is a set of well-defined requirements for the organisation to recover on time before an incident causes irreversible impact. Those needs and requirements are in turn assigned to tasks which is why it is vital to map the right skills of the staff to those tasks based on the company organigram.  

The BCM plan is a living document and has to constantly adapt to the changing company circumstances as well as after a BCP testing. Similarly, the assignment of roles and responsibilities must also reflect the changing plan—and also take into account the changes in personnel as well as how individuals actually performed in their roles.

The aspect of people in Business Continuity are not limited to roles and competencies of the organisation’s staff. No organisation can function without its people in the first place. During and after a crisis, it is the resilience of the people that make up an organisation’s community that get it back on its feet and working again. Moreover, the International Organisation for Standardisation, an independent, international body of experts in a range of industries, including Business Continuity Management (ISO 22301), has codified this approach in its relatively new guideline, ISO 22330. 

For more information on the topic and our Resiliency Solutions & Services, please contact us by email resiliency@birger.technology.

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