Winning Executive Support with Business Continuity Dashboards

As anyone who has tried to do it knows, obtaining support from management is one of the hardest challenges business continuity (BC) practitioners face. One tool that can help is the humble dashboard, provided it is intelligently designed and presented.

Related: How to Manage Management: 8 Tips to Help You Bring Your Bosses on Board

The Challenge of Getting Executive Buy-In

Business continuity programs live or die based on how much executive support they receive. But most BC professionals know from hard experience how difficult it is to obtain meaningful engagement and resources from the people who control the purse strings. 

Where this most comes up, and where the consequences can be make or break for the program, is in situations where the BC office goes before management to try to obtain funding for its initiatives.

A lucky few organizations have people in the leadership who take an informed, prudent interest in safeguarding their company’s future. More typical are organizations where management lacks knowledge of BC and discounts its value.

In these situations, education and clear communication can help close the gap between the BC office and the top execs. There are no guarantees this approach will work, but it is the only card we have to play.

One of the best tools I know of for helping gain top bosses’ attention and support is the humble dashboard, a collection of graphics providing at-a-glance insight into key aspects of the BC program. These most commonly appear in the form of color dials or bar graphs copied onto slides and shown to management during a presentation. 

Just as the speedometer and gas gauge on your car instantly convey vital information about the status of your vehicle, a BC dashboard quickly communicates critical data about the status of your program and the resilience of your organization.

But there’s a caveat: You can’t just throw out any old graphic that comes to mind and expect your audience to be wowed. To be effective, the components of your dashboard have to be conceived, designed, and presented with thought and care.

Let’s take a closer look at what kind of dashboards you should create and some of the common pitfalls people encounter in using them.

A CEO's Guide to Crafting a BC Dashboard

There’s a lot to say on the subtleties of using dashboards, but let’s cut to the chase. In my view, almost everything you need can be shown in three slides:

• Program Alignment with Standards

Your first slide should show how well your program is being built. Are you aligned with industry standards? Are there gaps? This is especially critical for highly regulated organizations or those under pressure from customers. Think of a dial showing that you are 80 percent in alignment with FFIEC or ISO 22301. If your program rests on a solid foundation, it will serve you well into the future.

• Risks and Residual Gaps

Next, show where your threats and gaps remain. Don’t boil the ocean; focus on the areas most critical to your company. The 80/20 rule applies: put your time, money, and resources where they’ll have the biggest impact. Across industries, we consistently see three weak points:

1) Recovery strategies are often underdeveloped or untested.

2) Exercises are often limited to tabletops, which do not validate recovery capabilities.

3) Recovery teams frequently include unprepared personnel. 

A dashboard might use bar graphs or dials to show how each area is scoring, along with a simple trend indicator: are we improving, flatlining, or slipping back? This way, executives can instantly see where vulnerabilities remain and how much progress is being made.

• The "Stock Price" of Your BC Program

Finally, present what I call the “stock price” of your program. This is a simple snapshot of the overall value of your BC investment, based on two things: how well you’re aligned with standards and how much residual risk remains. High alignment plus low risk equals a strong investment. Low alignment and high risk equal a weak one. The visual could be as simple as a single gauge or dial showing the overall value. In our BCMMetrics platform, this kind of display is already built into the dashboards. You can see your program’s overall status, based on compliance and risk, in a single view.

With these three slides, you can convey the essential information about your program: how solidly it’s built, where the risks remain, and what support is needed to strengthen it.

Your Dashboards Should Tell a Story

Here’s another thing about dashboards: they should tell a story.

As the practitioner, you know your program inside and out. The executives, on the other hand, probably know very little about it. Before sitting down with management, extract from your mass of data a simple, accurate story about the overall trend and needs of your program. 

The slides in your dashboard should deliver the main plot points of that story. When you’re finished telling it, the next step for the audience—the action you need from them—should be obvious.

Common Pitfalls in Working with Dashboards

Using dashboards effectively is straightforward, but there are also many ways they can go wrong. Here are some of the common mistakes we’ve seen with them:

• Using Volume Metrics 

Simply tallying up the volume of work you’ve done—how many BIAs completed or plans updated—is unlikely to impress a savvy audience. Those kinds of metrics might have value early in the life of a program. After that, what matters isn’t how hard you’ve worked, it’s the state of the program and the resilience of the company. 

• Causing Information Overload 

We’ve seen dashboards that drown management in dozens of slides and charts. The result? Eyes glaze over. A good dashboard is short, sharp, and to the point.

• Taking Too Long 

Rambling presentations have a tendency to bore listeners, undermine confidence, and close the funding tap. Be concise. You should be able to walk management through your dashboard in 30 minutes, 45 minutes at the most. 

• Not Being Prepared for Pushback

I said above that three specific slides should make up the heart of your presentation. That doesn’t mean those are the only ones you should prepare. You need to be ready for questions and pushback, especially if you anticipate that some of your assertions will not go down well with interested departments or skeptical executives. Supportive slides can help in this situation. Double- and triple-check everything you do and every conclusion you come to. Then be ready to respond to challenges to your assessments with relevant data.

• Underestimating People's Sensitivity

We learned about this mistake the hard way, by committing it ourselves. For better or worse, whether it’s executives or the departments, people tend to take it personally when something they are responsible for is assessed as being inadequate. This can easily become a distraction, shoving the needs of the BC program into the background. Be diplomatic in how you craft your dashboard and present your information.

• Not Studying Management

A lot of times, practitioners get in trouble due to a lack of advance work, specifically, a failure to learn how their management likes to be presented to. Some execs do prefer straight talk. Others must be handled with care. It’d be great if all leadership teams were of the first type, but as practical, results-oriented BC practitioners, we take life as we find it, and that includes the managers we present to. 

• Sugarcoating the Truth

Notwithstanding what I said in items 5 and 6 above, it is a mistake to sugarcoat significant gaps in a BC program. If you hide the truth and something goes wrong, the company could be severely impacted,  and you could be on the hook for not raising the alarm. Be polite in making your assessments, but also be clear and firm.

Dashboards are powerful tools, but they’re not magic. By avoiding these common mistakes, you can keep executives focused on the true state of your program and the steps needed to improve it.

Bringing It All Together

When thoughtfully designed and presented, dashboards can turn complex BC data into a clear, simple story, making it easier for management to understand the status of your program and more likely to support your initiatives. By focusing on alignment, residual risk, and overall program value, you can convey the health of your continuity position in a concise, digestible way.

To improve your chances of gaining leadership’s support, be sure to avoid such common pitfalls as overloading with data, rambling through presentations, needlessly stepping on people’s toes, or sugarcoating issues. By combining clarity, sensitivity, and honesty, you can make your dashboard a bridge between the BC office and company decision makers.

Interested in obtaining experienced help in presenting to leadership or in learning more about the state-of-the-art dashboards you can create in BCMMetrics? If so, contact MHA Consulting or BCMMetrics today.

Further Reading

• 5 Tips to Help You Ace Your BCM Presentation
• How to Manage Management: 8 Tips to Help You Bring Your Bosses on Board
• How Compliance Confidence Helps Small BC Teams Achieve Big Results
• The Missing Piece in Vendor Contracts: Business Continuity
• Mind the Gap: A Compliance Gap Analysis Shows Where Your BC Program Needs Work