 The COVID-19 pandemic has caused both the public and private sectors to make radical changes to their business continuity strategy to build resilience to natural, man-made and health-related threats. The Department of Finance recently held a business continuity-planning BCP training for various units in the department. Technical assistance was provided by the World Bank. Assistant Director for Financial Administration in the Department of Finance, Alison Griffith McDamid, said the Department of Finance is being used as a forerunner for this important training. The pandemic definitely showed us that without having proper planning that when a disaster happens that we are illiquid and so therefore we want to ensure that our operations continue. Of course we will not be able to do that 100 percent but of course you would want a critical component of government to be able to continue and for the BCP training and this is what we are trying to get our colleagues to understand that we can do everything but for sure we need to ensure that we have at least minimum operations to serve our stakeholders. The National Emergency Management Organization NEMO, the Department of Infrastructure and the Department of Audit, also participated in this training programme which is expected to be rolled out to other government agencies. The facilitator for the BCP training from the World Bank, Adam McAllister, noted that business continuity plans must be routinely updated to include contacts, dependencies, lessons learnt and resources required for recovery. So business continuity like any other type of process in the workplace takes time to develop expertise and we need to look at how we are developing and gaining experience so that we can apply lessons in real time. He added that the business impact analysis and business continuity in general is founded with a baseline of looking at the risks that the different services across the government face based on natural hazards, another threat facing the government or the community as a whole. So when we start with the business impact analysis it really gives us an opportunity to look at the types of risks that critical government services face and then determine what would the consequences be if something disrupted those services. How long do we have to get those services back up and running before the government and the public at large would really feel an impact from those? That creates a foundation for business continuity plans which really set the procedures in place so that we can make sure that our public services, especially those services that are very time sensitive, that we can get those back up and running as fast as possible. Information technology or IT systems is considered a time critical service that ranks very high in the risk profile in a business continuity plan. Peter Clovis is a systems administrator in the Department of Finance. IT plays a critical role in how our business operates but also in terms of in case of a disaster how the business continues. We've seen throughout every single unit the importance of IT and we as a unit of the Department of Finance have to ensure that we are a step ahead or at least try to be a step ahead in providing whatever services that are necessary in order that at least some level of continuity can happen throughout the department. The two-day workshop also focused on team building exercises to reinforce the value of cross sector collaboration in formulating and executing an effective business continuity plan for the National Competitiveness and Productivity Council Glenn Simon reporting.