Change management

Pandemics, market volatility, and internal changes to your organisation, people or technology can put your business at risk. Crises can quickly make change management an urgent priority.

Change management and disaster recovery

A structured approach helps you avoid rash changes in your business without proper planning. This prevents business interruption, lost productivity and profits, and even closure.

The aim of change management in business continuity and disaster recovery planning is to:

• minimise potential disruptions to your business
• find a cost-effective way to use resources to achieve change
• reduce the likelihood of returning to pre-change activities

Business continuity efforts are focused on proactively managing your business processes, assets, facilities, supply chains and human resources to ensure that, as far as possible, your business always functions at its highest capacity.

Disaster recovery, on the other hand, focuses on ensuring that contingency plans and procedures are in place to return business to usual as soon as possible after a crisis.

Role of change management in business continuity

Change management is a key activity in combination with both business continuity and disaster recovery planning. Its purpose is to help you introduce and implement changes to your business, product, process or system in a controlled and coordinated way, avoiding issues and risks along the way. As such, change management can:

• boost your business resiliency
• speed up recovery from critical issues
• help you create contingency strategies for situations where change doesn't go to plan

You should review your management plans and processes regularly to ensure they are fit and ready to use if and when you need them.

Address the barriers to organisational change management through risk management and business continuity planning.