Tip – Learn the Culture and Processes
Every company has its own culture. Prior to scheduling one-on-one meetings with process owners learn some of your organizations norms. Ideally upper-management will host a meet-and-greet lunch to introduce you to the team. It is a great setting to ‘break-the-ice’ and to start getting a feel for how people interact and their personalities.
The next step is to schedule one-on-one meetings with each process owner. Make them real low-key meetings – friendly and not too long. I have seen ‘green’ business continuity professionals come on too strong and blow things up from the ‘git-go’. You know, setting up three hour meetings with 74 slide generic PowerPoint’s that cause process owners to ‘glaze over’, start looking at their watches and try to find creative excuses to somehow get the heck out of those marathon meetings.
I have witnessed ‘whet behind the ears’ over-eager business continuity professional’s barge into process owner’s offices without proper introduction and behave like efficiency experts looking to cut jobs. Whoa, sloooow down cowboy/cowgirl. Complaints to upper management the first week are not the best way to launch a program.
During these introductory meetings you should allay their fears. Keep it all about them. Remind them of some industry related disaster recovery horror stories where people lost their jobs and how the impacted company went out of business because they did not have a tested business continuity program. In my experience this sort of stuff really hits home or to put it more succinctly; it rightfully scares the sh*! out of people. There are lots of statistics validating the high percentage of companies that go out of business when they encounter a disruptive event and do not have a plan. I will provide a bunch in the May / June issues of Real Continuity.
During meetings it is important to let them talk. Tip – if you are doing most of the talking then there is a problem. Throttle it back. You should actively listen and ask probing questions. Do not interrupt them or finish their sentences. The more they talk, the more you get to know their pain points.
Begin understanding their business process and ‘what keeps them up at night’. Learn which business processes they depend on (upstream) and which processes depend on them (downstream). This information will be critical when you map the upstream and downstream dependencies as part of your dependency analysis and BIA (Business Impact Analysis not Bit in Ass).
When you ask ‘what keeps you up at night’ often people will say ‘going to the bathroom’, which is cool as it indicates you are beginning to build a relationship. They are loosening up. Make sure you laugh. Please practice your laugh right now so it does not sound phony during the real meeting. I will wait…. good but relax …one more time… please laugh……….excellent. If you do these intro meetings in a light manner the info will begin flowing, sometimes like an ocean. You will hear some amazing things. Maybe even some safety issues such as, ‘I can’t remember the last time we had a fire-drill’ or ‘I do not even know what a rally-point is’. Jot everything down while trying to maintain eye-contact throughout.
Keep the meeting to the allotted time. I usually schedule the first meeting for 47 or 49 minutes – not 50, 51. If you really think you need 60 (you don’t) please make it 55. More on the psychology of scheduling meetings in the May edition of Real Continuity as well as tips on ways to keep your meetings / exercises interesting and participants happy. Remember, most process owners are really busy so please be respectful of their time.
Finally, please do not assign them ‘homework’ at this point. Always hand them a couple of your business cards and let them know they can call you anytime – including weekends and nights – and mean it!
