Testing
In order to faniliarise the organisation with the Set of Standards and verify its functionality and accuracy, it should be tested. Only frequent tests will keep an organisation prepared for its tasks for an calamity situation. At the same time, deficiencies may become clear during the testing, which require the measures to be adjusted. The testing frequency depends on the internal quality requirements, management expectations and the extent of the organisation’s ability to realise a certain testing frequency. A testing should at least be executed once or twice a year.On top of that, the following factors may be reason to execute a testing:
- Great changes in the infrastructure
- Added or altered business processes
- Personnel changes in teams
- When information is received of heightened risk
- Change of locations
Maintenance of measures
Too often calamities are assumed to happen anywhere but to oneself, which is the reason that the attention for BCM necessity is lost. As a result the measures that were once taken do not work, are not available or that procedures are not up to date any longer. This is why continuous attention must be given to organisatorial changes. These changes will have to be tested against, among others, policy and measures in time and, wherever necessary, implemented. For regular maintenance, procedures will have to be determined. If personal changes take place in the business as usual, these will also have to be implemented in the organisational facilities of the CMT and BCP. The same goes for moves, process changes, new processes and the disappearance of processes in the business as usual. Because it is very well possible that changes will not be implemented, there will, beside regular maintenance, also be periodic maintenance on the planning. For periodic maintenance on measures this is is the same as for testing. Here the internal quality requirements are desisive as well. In the most organisations, periodic maintenance is done once or twice a year, beside regular maintenance.
Quality
Any process is being threatened in its functioning, so is BCM. If these risks are not fully controlled, the process objectives will be endangered. For Business Continuity Management the auditing process is one of the measures with which risks are controlled. In this case the quality of the Business Continuity Management process is assessed. The objective is giving the organisational management certainty on the functionality of the process. In order to obtain additional certainty on the functionality of the BCM process within the organisation, accreditation can be executed.
