Tip – Get ahead by satisfying management’s love for metrics
Management loves metrics. They need metrics to gauge progress and to identify trouble spots they may be able to help you with in maturing the business continuity program. It is important that you proactively and regularly provide management with whatever they need.
Don’t worry, your metric report does not have to be fancy. A simple progress report on a bi-weekly or monthly basis may be what they want and need. The format can be a dashboard built in an Excel or Google Sheet spreadsheet. The dashboard should include completion percentages and deliverable dates of the major phases of your program – Initiation, Risk Analysis, BIA, Strategy development, Plan development, Testing, Awareness and Maintenance.
If your management is more into formal visual presentations you can do pretty PowerPoint decks.
Tip – iDashboards.com has some unbelievable real-time dashboards. There is a cost though. These types of dashboards are in the category of business analysis software. I plan to devote an article in an upcoming issue of Real Continuty to using real-time dashboards in business continuity. As risks, plans, testing results change the dashboards automatically reflect the changes ‘on the fly’. Very cool stuff that management will love and will help you immensely.
A key to providing metrics is to play in your management’s comfort zone. Some managers only require informal written status reports and others want weekly or monthly face-to-face meetings with detailed reports. You should package your metrics to match their preferences. Upper management is key to your success. One exception is if they want daily meetings they may be micro-managing and it can eat into your productivity.
Try to avoid scope-creep in your program at all costs. Missed deliverable’s are bad for you and bad for your company. Believe it or not, I was once carrying a Fortune 100 program (my VP’s words not mine); co-writing a 200 page BC administration manual, implementing a global intelligent mass notification system, scheduling thousands of yearly exercises (yes thousands), performing twenty-five tabletops annually, supporting six relocation exercises with up to 100 participants in each and supporting national and global day-to-day business continuity in fourteen countries. In 2008 I met all of my deliverable’s except one – and it was a minor one with zero impact. I missed it by one day, two days before Christmas because a critical business subject expert was on vacation. It cost me my yearly bonus when I needed it the most. Only time I missed a bonus in my long career. Sad but true. I suppose it was a ‘learning experience’
In conclusion, provide your upper management with whatever they need and communicate regularly with them. Never hide anything. Be transparent. Doing so will pay off in gold.
