Interim Business Continuity Manager
Location: Mornington Crescent, Greater London House, NW1
Department: Internal Audit & Risk (IAR team)
Level: Guide (Manager Grade)
Reports to: Head of Internal Audit & Risk
Days in the office per week: Three
Company Description
We're ASOS, the online retailer for fashion lovers all around the world.
We exist to give our customers the confidence to be whoever they want to be, and that goes for our people too. At ASOS, you're free to be your true self without judgement, and channel your creativity into a platform used by millions.
Everyone needs some help showing up as their best self. We're Disability Confident Committed - let our Talent team know if you need any reasonable adjustments throughout the recruitment process.
Job Description
As Interim Business Continuity Manager, you’ll be tasked with accelerating and demonstrating risk-focussed progress of our new programme strengthening how ASOS prepares for, responds to and recovers from disruption. You’ll help shape a refreshed approach to resilience, connecting critical business operations, technology and operational recovery, crisis management and third-party resilience into a practical Group framework that supports our fast-paced global business.
Working closely with teams across Technology, Supply Chain, Customer, Commercial, Finance, People, Legal, Procurement and beyond, you’ll provide clear advice, challenge and support that helps ASOS build stronger governance, controls and operational resilience.
The Details
- Play a key role in shaping and accelerating a refreshed ASOS approach to Business Continuity Management, helping to connect business continuity, disaster recovery, crisis management, critical third-party resilience, operational recovery planning into a coherent Group framework. Help drive the delivery of our maturity improvement programme and support its transition into a sustainable BAU framework.
- Refresh Business Impact Assessments, coordinate plan reviews and lessons learned activities, track remediation actions, and support testing, training and exercising activities as required.
- Work collaboratively with Technology, Supply Chain, Digital Product, Customer, Commercial, Finance, People, Communications, Security, Legal, Procurement and other stakeholders to align recovery objectives, dependencies, plans and testing activity across critical business services. Ensure clear roles and responsibilities within a federated ownership model where functional and technology leaders remain accountable for their own recovery capabilities.
- Help ensure resilience improvement activities are aligned to ASOS' maturing Minimum Viable Company definition, critical business operations and agreed recovery objectives. Advise on development and testing of relevant runbooks, playbooks and recovery plans as required.
- Support incident and crisis management activity as required, including contributing to response coordination, insurance notifications and claims processes, post-incident reviews and lessons learned.
- Provide advice, challenge and training on resilience and related governance and controls. Simplify complex topics to aid understanding and engagement, while keeping recommendations practical and aligned to commercial realities.
- Identify and drive opportunities for AI, data analytics and automation within resilience activities, adopting and embedding new tools, techniques and methodologies where they improve effectiveness, visibility or efficiency.
- Support our culture by championing Diversity, Equity & Inclusion strategies.
We believe being together in person helps us move faster, connect more deeply, and achieve more as a team. That’s why our approach to working together includes spending at least three days a week in the office. It’s a rhythm that speeds up decision-making, helps ASOSers learn from each other more quickly, and builds the kind of culture where people can grow, create, and succeed.
Qualifications
About You
- Significant experience designing and delivering business continuity, disaster recovery, crisis management, operational resilience or similar programmes in retail, operations or commercial businesses that have heavy reliance on technology. Ability to articulate risk prioritisation and focus and track and demonstrate progress to oversight committees.
- Relevant professional qualification in a risk, resilience, business continuity, disaster recovery, operational resilience, controls or governance focused business area, an advantage but not essential.
- Strong risk and controls awareness, experience of complex and less mature operating environments and analytical problem-solving skills.
- Strong negotiation and influencing skills. A willingness to work with the business to understand commercial perspectives when defining fit for purpose governance, controls and resilience expectations. Someone who wants to make a difference and is excited about getting stuck in and adding value.
- Excellent stakeholder management and relationship building skills with the ability to lead thinking on resilience risk and internal control best practice in an e-commerce retail environment.
- Good verbal and written communication skills. The ability to tailor delivery of clear, powerful and succinct messages to audiences at different levels, including senior leadership and governance committees.
- Self-motivated and able to work pro-actively on their own as well as within teams. A flexible multi-tasker who can deal with competing priorities and ambiguity that comes with our fast paced, ever-changing business and risk landscape.