Getting Management Buy-In

Although business continuity planning is considered by many to be critical, there may be some executives who still don't see the need and are unwilling to invest money in BCP. If you work in such an organization, this week's articles may provide you with some helpful information and tactics you need to get buy-in to begin or expand your business continuity plan.

Statistics and scare tactics don't work on senior management; instead the starting point is ensuring that you have a deep understanding of the business landscape, strategies and risks. (Item #1)     Here are a few tips that can help you in getting internal buy-in for your BC program. (Item #2)     Aside from pulling the plug, here are some strategies for selling DR to the C-Suite. (Item #3)    

Continuous commitment by senior management helps in institutionalizing business continuity into organizational culture. (Item #4)     In the absence of an event or other external mandate, how do you keep management engaged and willing to continuously invest in organizational preparedness? (Item #5)     How do you ensure buy-in when by definition top management is, well, at the top? (Item #6)    

As always, we look forward to hearing your comments & insights regarding business continuity. If you have a topic you'd like us to cover, email me at [email protected].

Bob Mellinger, President
Attainium Corp

1. Obtaining executive management commitment to business continuity program support

There are many approaches that business continuity practitioners can take in convincing executive management to allocate funds and resources to a robust business continuity program. Many try to overwhelm with statistics and scare tactics. I believe these actually detract from the program by making sweeping examples that are typically outdated, untrue, and not applicable. Industry statistics, in many cases are either unverifiable, or can be traced back to a vendor that may benefit from the negative information. We owe it to our profession to always strive for accurate, verifiable information when citing examples in support of developing and maintaining a program.
http://www.continuitycentral.com/feature1142.html

2. Four Tips for Getting Internal Buy-In for Your Business Continuity (BC) Program

Gaining internal buy-in for a BC program from peers and executive leadership is a common challenge for BC/DR professionals. Some have chosen to go about it alone. But going it alone without strategic considerations from executive management and other core teams can be disastrous. For one thing, after Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is done, people won't agree on criticality ratings in the BC process/system. This in turn will create confusion during the exercise, as you may not have set expectation properly. Getting internal buy-in for your BC/DR program will help you to develop and sustain a successful BC program in place.
http://quantivate.com/four-tips-getting-internal-buy-business-continuity-bc-program/

3. How to Sell Disaster Recovery to Senior Management: 5 Strategies You Can Use

This was a real live question that was asked during a VMworld 2012 session about disaster recovery, and I heard it asked again at Gartner's Risk and Security Summit just last month. In case others are also facing this challenge, we decided to write a white paper about it. In doing so, we conducted several inquiries with top-tier analysts to see how they would tackle this question. Below I share the top 5 strategies we came up with for talking some sense into those recalcitrant C-level types (and no, we don't suggest manufacturing any disasters to force the issue).
http://blog.sungardas.com/2013/07/how-to-sell-disaster-recovery-to-senior-management-5-strategies-you-can-use/#sthash.VniNsdhe.dpuf
If you wish, you can sign in to download the full white paper here:
http://www.sungardas.com/KnowledgeCenter/WhitePapersandAnalystReports/Pages/how-to-sell-disaster-recovery-to-senior-management.aspx

4. Business continuity initiatives: when to involve senior management

The commitment and involvement of senior management are increasingly recognized as pre-requisites for any successful business continuity management (BCM) initiative. Research supports this. Gartner Research listed Executive Management Commitment for the BCM program as the number one best practice for creating and maintaining effective business continuity management plans [1]. However, demonstration of this commitment tends to be subjective and is not up to the required level in the majority of organizations. The recently published international BCM Standard-ISO 22301:2012 highlights the role of and expectation from senior management in BCM programs. The objective of this article is to describe what the ISO 22301 Standard and COBIT 5 expect from senior management in BCM programs.
http://www.continuitycentral.com/feature1035.html

5. Overcoming preparedness fatigue

All business continuity professionals eventually face the prospect of preparedness fatigue in their organization. In the absence of a crisis affecting the organization, even a competitor or a large-scale disaster that wakes the organization's leadership team to the reality of business continuity preparedness, management attention often wanes and begins to focus on other competing, pressing matters.
http://www.continuitycentral.com/feature0561.htm

6. Three Perspectives for Getting Buy-in From Management

One of the most frustrating and futile exercises throughout the business world is attempting to implement a strategic plan without total management support. All of the thought put into planning and all of the work done through performance management focused on employees cannot replace this essential facet of your organization's strategy: 100% buy in from those at the top.
http://onstrategyhq.com/resources/3-perspectives-for-getting-buy-in-from-management/