Art of Essentialism BCM Office Leader

I recently spoke at the DRJ Fall Conference in San Diego on the Art of Essentialism and its application in the BCM arena.  The Art of Essentialism was coined by Greg McKeown and is focused on “Less means More, More Means Mediocore”.  As part of my presentation, I covered what it takes to operate a BCM program based on the Art of Essentialism and its concept of the disciplined pursuit of less.

I believe that the problem in many of the BCM programs we are called to  support in a consultative role is not the program itself but the management of the program by the BCM Office Leader.  In many cases, the program is in chaos with no strategic direction or management.

So what are the characteristics of an Art of Essentialism BCM Office Leader:

• Uses Metrics to Track BCM Program Performance – Adopt a BCM standard or use a tool like BCMMETRICS.com to assess your level of compliance.  Identify your successes and areas of opportunity.  Focus to high importance, low compliance areas to get the highest Return on Investment (ROI) for resiliency.
• Manages by High Value Activities (HVA) – Identify what HVA’s give us the highest ROI for resiliency.
• Positions Right People in the Right Seats – Do you have a personnel depth chart for you and your team members?  You should know where talents lie and how you should assign to your HVA’s.  More people is not the right answer, the right people is the right answer.
• Develops Strategic Roadmap – Based on our critical needs, a roadmap for 12 to 24 months is developed focused on HVA’s to bring highest ROI.
• Heavily Invests BCM Personnel Time on HVAs  – Based on personnel depth, personnel are assigned to the HVA’s based on their expertise.
• Believes in Investing Front End Time with Customers – Time is invested in building the infrastructure  needed to have a strong program.
• Works like an Intrapreneur – Treats the BCM program as his/her own company with strategic goals and objectives to meet and a focus on resiliency ROI.

The focused disciplined pursuit of less will yield a BCM program that has a high level of resiliency for the most critical business activities and systems/applications of the organization.