Background

A Business Continuity Management System (BCMS) is a set of policies, processes and procedures that are required to plan for and react to an event that threatens your businesses ability to operate normally and achieve its intended outcomes.

• Continually improve planning for and reactions to risks that can disrupt your business;
• Achieve more business and compete more effectively in tenders;
• Give your customers confidence that you can consistently deliver a service to them;
• Address risks and opportunities to help build a sustainable business;
• Demonstrate you have strong corporate governance and;
• Work effectively with stakeholders and your supply chain.

The standard is based on seven quality management principles that senior management in your business need to focus on and address. They are:

• Customer focus
• Leadership
• Engagement of people
• Adopting a process approach
• Improvement
• Evidence based decision making
• Relationship management

All recently updated versions of ISO standards have a common structure of 10 sections enabling any business, working to an ISO standard anywhere in the world, to show evidence of:

1-3 – The Scope of your BCMS including normative references, terms & definitions

4 – Understanding the context of your organisation including recognising the needs and expectations of interested parties

5 – Leadership and worker participation

6 – Planning of business activities including addressing risks and opportunities and setting objectives that are S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measureable, achievable, realistic and time-based) that have relevance at all levels of the business meaning each employee understands how their job supports meeting the Business Continuity Planning Objectives

7 – Providing support to enable those activities

8 – Operating your business to achieve the BCMS

9 – Evaluating performance through feedback, internal auditing and management review

10 – Improvement!

Businesses should adopt a “Plan, Do, Check, Act” process approach that can be explained as:

Plan – Your management manual, procedures, work instructions etc.

Do – The actual work you do

Check – How do you monitor, measure, obtain feedback and assess objectives?

Act – Management review activities assess performance and act to improve

This “PDCA” cycle leads to continual improvement and can be summarised as follows:

Why have it?

Working and being certified to the ISO 22301 BCMS standard will help you to:

• Identify and manage current and future threats to your business;
• Take a proactive approach to minimising the impacts of incidents;
• Keep critical functions up and running during any/all unexpected crises
• Keep business downtime to an absolute minimum during incidents and aid in recovery time and;
• Demonstrate to customers, suppliers and tendering bodies that your business is well-governed and has planned for resilience during any incidents or crises that you might encounter.

Following the massive impacts of COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021, holding ISO 22301 is also more and more likely to become a minimum requirement for a service provider to Central and Local Government, FM organisations and large business.

Costs

As mentioned above you need to first purchase a copy of the standard and then budget costs for implementing and running the BCMS prior to initial assessment.  You may wish to do this yourselves or you may engage an appropriately qualified and experienced independent consultant who can quote to assist you through the preparation process.

QSS can then, on request, complete your initial assessment and set up an annual surveillance cycle.

Please contact us for costs.