Your auditors (and, if you have one, your audit committee) can be powerful allies in your quest for an effective business continuity management programme. Aside from instilling fear and despair in those within the organisation that have something to hide, they have an envious ability to shake things up and get things moving. In short, they are effective activity creators.

But you need to get organised if you’re going to use them to best effect. Rather than trying to elicit their help on an ad-hoc basis, it’s much more effective to get hold of their audit schedule in advance so you know who they’ll be talking to, about what and when. Then you can highlight, in advance, any outstanding business continuity issues that need to be followed up (such as actions from previous exercises and tests, plan reviews and updates, and so forth) and give the auditors time to build the relevant questions into their forthcoming audits.

So if, despite your best efforts, your business continuity management programme is suffering from a bit of inertia, why not have a friendly chat with your auditors and see if you can get them to shake things up and create a bit of activity for you?