What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on 6.3 Planning of changes?

A procedure or approach for planning changes to the ISMS; Records of ISMS changes showing the reason, plan, responsibilities and timing; Evidence that consequences of the change and resource needs were considered; Updates to documented information following the change.

What is the most common gap auditors find on 6.3?

ISMS changes such as scope or process changes are made informally with no plan

ISO/IEC 27001:2022 · Clause 6

`6.3` Planning of changes

Where the organization decides the ISMS needs to change, the change has to be made in a planned way. This clause is new in the 2022 edition.

Source: ISO/IEC 27001:2022, 6.3. 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 ISO/IEC 27001:2022 in the compliance library.

Clauses 4 to 10 are the management-system requirements: none of them can be excluded when an organisation claims conformity. The 93 Annex A controls are a reference set: one may be excluded with a justification in the Statement of Applicability. Certification bodies assess conformity; the evidence lists here are what auditors commonly ask for, not a list the standard prescribes.

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

Records of ISMS changes showing the reason, plan, responsibilities and timing · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Evidence that consequences of the change and resource needs were considered · Document repository

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

A procedure or approach for planning changes to the ISMS · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Updates to documented information following the change · Document repository

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

ISMS changes such as scope or process changes are made informally with no plan
No record exists of why a change was made
Changes are made without updating the documentation
The clause is not addressed at all because it was new in 2022

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

6.2 Information security objectives and planning to achieve them · 7.1 Resources