… BCAW 2012

Business Continuity Awareness Week is underway for 2012 – if you had not realised this, you can find the website here.

The major event of Day 1 for me was the “C-level Water Cooler Meeting” Webinar. This was a session intended to introduce a new initiative of the BCI Partnership.

It would appear to be a wide-spread problem that many BC practitioners are unable to adequately engage with Senior Management and Executives. This initiative is intended to provide resources to help.

If you are attending DRJ Spring World next week, you could come and listen to my session on the same topic – “Putting ‘management’ into BCM”.

The BCI initiative was structured in three parts;

Knowing them (being C-level Execs)

• Some very generic profiles where used as examples – which is good advice if people realise the need to go well beyond the stereotypes and actually profile the real person in your organisation.
• It was interesting that for each profile the key messages boiled down to;
• Solve a current problem for them
• Run a targeted exercise addressing their areas of accountability

Knowing BCM

• This part was about the BCI lifecycle, and knowing the hooks you can use to be relevant.
• I asked the equation about also knowing the inherent weaknesses of this idea of BCM – I think we still struggle with pitching an operational concept to strategic-level folks.

Knowing yourself

• An excellent addition, and long overdue.
• We need to recognise that BC practitioners are rarely managers – and many have had no management experience.
• This section was about the ‘soft skills’ that are needed to manage upwards.
• As Phil Carter (the present of this section) noted – “You cannot manage people you don’t understand.”

As I noted earlier, this is a new initiative and seems to be addressing a serious obstacle to becoming a profession. Good work Lee Glendon and the team. Keep an eye out for the recording of this session, I would be interested in your thoughts on the subject.

The second webinar I listened to was entitled “Business Continuity Awareness for Senior Management”, and was presented by Georges Cowan from the BCI Canada.

Unfortunately this session contributed to the problem rather than the solution. There was very little here for Senior Management, and if your Sng Mngt tuned in you may have lost them already. There was a lot of work in the presentation and Georges covered his material well – the problem is that Senior Management don’t need to be lectured on the BCM process and “IT DR buzz words”.

The message about understanding ‘them’ and finding the hooks for relevance needs to be promoted. Relevance is one of the key themes in my presentation, and when we abandon relevance we run the risk of losing Executives interest very quickly.

Sometimes the left hand and the right hand need to be in sync – next year we should aim for BCI Awareness week, and have it the week before BCAW.

Did you attend any of the Day 1 sessions? What are you doing for BCAW 2012 in your organisation?