How do you know if your risk management and business continuity works?

In terms of identifying your known risks, try to avoid just mirroring what another company has done or what a pre defined framework tells you to. You know your business and industry, your peers have insights to provide too. So gather a group from across as wide a section of your company as you can and discuss what actual risks exist within your company and specific industry vertical. Gather insights from all areas as your risks may encompass other areas but you may lack visibility into business critical workflows or areas. Determine these specific risks to your company and then rank and assess likelihood, impact, recoverability and resilience for each.

If a physical drill is not practical to bring a Scenario to life, then an alternative "walk through" will be more critical & should be completed periodically. Ensure all impacted parties are identified and that each has a clear understanding of roles, responsibilities and comms channels. Changes in personnel, core tech or dependencies may not be immediately obvious and ensuring all stakeholders have a voice in any review will help to ensure any changes or lessons learned are captured & carried forward to any revision, along with residual/retained risks. Consider how stress will impact the plan and actively try to break or find holes within it. This applies to physical risk & cyber UK - download Protect Uk App to all stakeholder mobiles.

I would like to emphasise the importance of real-world testing and external certifications in ensuring the efficacy of risk management and business continuity plans. Beyond internal assessments, third-party certifications , such as those monitored by Uptime Institute, offer a rigorous evaluation of a facility's resilience. These assessments replicate actual disruptions, providing an independent evaluation of your infrastructure's robustness. Furthermore, securing and maintaining relevant ISO certifications demonstrates the effectiveness of your risk mitigation processes. ISO standards are globally recognised and signify a commitment to best practices in various domains, including business continuity.

If we maintain records of past incidents, near misses, or disruptions that occur within our facilities. And analyze these records, we can very well determine if our facility can effectively respond to and recover from such events.

“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” There’s a reason this is an old and widely repeated adage, it’s true. Your resilience plans should always encompass continuous improvement as a defined exercise with or without an incident to trigger a lessons learned exercise. Testing should be designed to identify both areas of weakness and areas of improvement in your plans and in the event of an actual incident the keystone should always be to identify a prevention mechanism for the trigger of the incident that just happened. Respond then learn, recover then learn, test then learn, plan then learn.

Regular Evaluation is important. Continuously assess the performance of your risk management and business continuity plans by conducting periodic reviews. This should involve analyzing the effectiveness of risk mitigation strategies, the efficiency of response plans, and the alignment with business objectives.

We could also take the help of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Develop and track relevant KPIs to measure the effectiveness of your risk management and business continuity efforts. These can include metrics such as time to recover, cost of recovery, employee awareness, and customer satisfaction. Regularly review these KPIs to identify areas of improvement.

A well-informed team is more likely to respond effectively to emergencies.So we need to evaluate the level of training and awareness among your facility management team and occupants and Assess the effectiveness of your communication systems during emergencies.