Facilities management
Facilities management keeps the premises, utilities and access a core service needs, and it supplies the physical single points of failure that the resource review in 5.7 must address.
This annex is informative. Annex A names the discipline and does not define it. A finding cannot rest on the annex alone. The guidance it supports is clause 5.8, and the evidence on this page is our interpretation of what that support looks like in practice.
What Annex A says
Annex A names facilities management as a supporting discipline; it does not set its scope. Within 5.8, the contribution is the physical environment: buildings, utilities, access, security of the site, maintenance and the services that keep the building usable. The resilience question is which facilities are critical to a core service and what happens if they are unavailable. That includes less obvious dependencies such as cooling, water, lifts, loading bays and the road access that the continuity plan may assume.
Why it matters
Facilities are often managed as a cost centre, with maintenance deferred until the risk is visible. The resilience conversation changes the priority: a deferred maintenance item on a critical system is a single point of failure, not a budget saving. The discipline also intersects with health and safety, security and environmental management. The useful evidence is a short critical facilities list, a maintenance record and a tested alternative arrangement, not a full condition survey.
What good looks like
Identify the facilities each core service depends on. Record the critical systems within them and the maintenance status. Mark the single points of failure and the alternative arrangement for each. Test one alternative, such as a temporary location or a backup utility, once a year. Review the list when a lease, a site or a service changes.
Evidence a reviewer asks for
There is no ISO certification or accredited assessment scheme for ISO 22316. The assessor here is your internal auditor, a customer assurance team or a consultant.
An assessor will ask which building or utility failure would stop a core service and what the alternative is. A maintenance backlog without a criticality view does not answer that.
- Critical facilities list Facilities and building systems a core service depends on, with the owner
- Maintenance record The maintenance status of each critical system, including deferred work
- Alternative arrangement The temporary location, utility or access route, with the time to activate
- Test record The last test of an alternative arrangement and the issues found
Where it commonly fails
- Maintenance is deferred on critical systems to meet a budget target.
- The continuity plan assumes the building is available.
- No alternative location or utility arrangement has been tested.
What to do before the second edition
Walk the critical site with the facilities lead and ask what would stop the service. Photograph the single points of failure and put them on the risk register with an owner.
Read across
- 5.7 Availability of resources
- 5.8 Development and coordination of management disciplines
- 6.3.1 Methods and processes