Change management

Many things can put your business at risk, including pandemics, market volatility, and changes to your organisation, people or technology. Crises can quickly turn change management from a best practice discipline into an urgent and critical business activity.

Change management and disaster recovery

A robust change management approach can help you avoid making unnecessary or rash changes in your business without thorough planning and analysis. This can, in turn, thus help you avoid negative outcomes such as business interruption, loss of 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 all your management plans and processes regularly to ensure they are fit and ready to use if and when you need them.

Assess the barriers to organisational change management and address them through risk management and business continuity and crisis management planning.