SmartSuite for the Business Continuity Manager

Each continuity plan carries an owner, a review cycle and a version history in Operational Resilience, with automated reminders when a review falls due, so no plan quietly ages past its date.

Critical services map to the processes, systems, facilities, vendors and teams behind them, so a recovery procedure sits beside the dependencies it has to restore rather than in a separate binder.

Crisis Management playbooks hold escalation paths, notification lists and communication routes, and alerts and escalations trigger by severity and predefined rules, so a call-out runs from the playbook rather than from a spreadsheet.

Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) links each Business Impact Analysis (BIA) to the risks and mitigation plans it addresses, so the Operational Risk Manager and you agree which functions need deeper coverage.

Third-party dependencies on critical services are tracked with the plan, so when a vendor's resilience changes you and the IT Disaster Recovery Lead see which recovery paths are affected.

Tabletop exercises send tasks to the Crisis Management Lead, facilities and IT participants automatically, track who took part and record outcomes against the plan that was tested.

Lessons from each exercise or incident link to the remediation task or plan revision they produced, so the next version of the plan shows what was learned and when.

BIAs, tests, incidents, reviews and ownership changes are retained in sequence, so an FFIEC or DORA examiner sampling a plan sees its whole life rather than the latest copy.

After an incident, the AI Assistant in a SmartDoc field drafts the report and regulatory narrative from the actions and timings logged during the response, so the account is accurate and ready while memories are fresh.

Head of Operational Resilience

The Business Continuity Manager owns the continuity and recovery plans for business functions, their links to BIAs, critical processes and dependencies, the contact trees and notification arrangements, the exercise program and its results, and the continuity response during incidents. They track plan reviews, approvals and corrective actions and report recovery readiness to the Head of Operational Resilience. In SmartSuite the plans, BIAs, exercises and incidents live in Operational Resilience, Business Impact Analysis (BIA) and Crisis Management.

SmartSuite keeps continuity plans version-controlled in Operational Resilience and linked to the key business functions and BIAs they protect, with automated reminders for reviews and exercises. The manager sees which plans are due for review, which have been approved in their current version and which exercises are scheduled, and a change in a BIA is visible on the plans that depend on it. Plan owners receive their reminders directly.

BIAs are linked to enterprise risks and their mitigation plans, so continuity coverage follows the risk register rather than being maintained as a separate exercise. When the Operational Risk Manager rates a risk higher, the manager can see which business functions and plans it touches; when a BIA shows a function is more critical than assumed, that feeds back to the risk owner. Both teams work from one set of records.

Exercise results are recorded against the plan exercised, and the corrective actions they generate go into Issues Management with owners and dates, tracked to closure. That gives the manager a history per plan: what was exercised, what failed, what was agreed and whether it was done before the next exercise. Recovery Plan Owners see their own actions, and the Business Continuity Analyst aggregates results across the program.

The manager reports recovery readiness to the Head of Operational Resilience from dashboards SmartSuite builds on the plan, exercise and action records, so readiness is a current state rather than a quarterly compilation. The same dashboards support continuous improvement: the manager can see which functions lag on reviews or exercises and work with the IT Disaster Recovery Lead and Facilities Director on the dependencies those plans rely on.

During an incident the manager coordinates the continuity response in Crisis Management, where the plans, contact trees and notification arrangements already maintained in SmartSuite are available to the response team rather than retrieved from a file share. Actions taken during the response are recorded as they happen, which gives the Crisis Management Lead a live picture and leaves the record needed for the post-incident review and for the regulators who sample it.

Start with the continuity plan register: load each plan in Operational Resilience with its owner, review cycle and linked business function, and link it to its BIA so reminders and dependencies work from the start. New customers can start with SmartSuite Onboarding, a guided four-week program around one or two priority workflows. The first exercise and its corrective actions then run through Operational Resilience and Issues Management.