What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on BCM-03 Planning business continuity?

Plan set demonstrably built on the outputs of the impact analysis; Statement of applicability naming the standards the planning follows; Plan ownership and approval record with scheduled review dates; Recovery procedure including manual workarounds and component restoration order.

What is the most common gap auditors find on BCM-03?

Plans stored only in systems that become unavailable in the scenarios they address

BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue) · C5: Business Continuity Management

`BCM-03` Planning business continuity

Implement a single documented continuity and contingency planning framework derived from the impact analysis and anchored to standards in a statement of applicability, covering scope, plan accessibility, named owners, communication and customer notification, recovery and interim procedures, activation, improvement and incident management interfaces.

Source: BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue), BCM-03. The statement above is our statement of the clause, read from the published text and cited so you can check it against the official text, not the instrument verbatim. Open BSI C5 (121-criteria catalogue) in the compliance library.

The edition of the catalogue is not stamped here; check the edition your attestation is issued against.

artefacts

held by a system

at each review

hard

to go live

Policy repository / GRC workspace

where the evidence lives

teal = a system already holds it · olive = produced at each review. To go live: easy when half or more of the artefacts are already held by a system, moderate from a quarter to a half, hard below a quarter.

These are the artefacts auditors commonly ask for on this requirement, our guidance rather than text from the standard. Your assessor decides what is sufficient in your context, and asks for samples across the period when a report covers one.

system holds itEvidence a system already holds

none for this control

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

Plan ownership and approval record with scheduled review dates · Policy repository / GRC workspace

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Plan set demonstrably built on the outputs of the impact analysis · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Statement of applicability naming the standards the planning follows · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Recovery procedure including manual workarounds and component restoration order · Policy repository / GRC workspace

First move

No system holds this evidence for you: it is people and documents. Reminders and routing to the owner still save time. Put the document under version control with an owner and review date, and log each review as a record with reviewer and date.

Common gaps auditors find

Plans stored only in systems that become unavailable in the scenarios they address
Restoration sequence for infrastructure components not prioritised or agreed with customers
Each team keeps its own plan format, so there is no single consistent framework
Customer notification channels absent from the plans

Do this for your whole sheet

Paste the rows you run your controls from and get this mapping for every control at once, with the periodic-review ones flagged and a first move per row. No account for the first run.

Build my evidence sheet

BCM-02 Business impact analysis policies and instructions · BCM-04 Verification, updating and testing of the business continuity