by Ron LaPedis (and Vaishali Jain)
It was a sunny but cold late December day in San Francisco. Ron LaPedis and Vaishali Jain had just come back inside after buying lunch to go from a pop-up stall area at the new Salesforce transit center. As we sat down to eat, I could see a question forming behind her eyes, and I already knew what my answer was going to be.
“You know that BRMA has a mentoring program, right?” I replied that I did, and it was then that we knew we wanted to be together – as mentor and mentee.
Less than 30 minutes later, it was apparent that fate had intervened early when both of us received the same email from Fiona Raymond-Cox; “Hi Ron, Vaishali, Great news! You have been selected to participate in the 6-month BRMA mentoring program running January – June 2020.” Okay, so now it was getting weird. And little did we know that just 3 months later, COVID-19 would make the mentoring program all that more valuable.
After working for nearly two years at BOX under the expert tutelage of Renuka Darbha, Vaishali had decided to move to ServiceNow as the senior program manager for business continuity management.
The Players
Before working at BOX, Vaishali was a consultant for Deloitte for four years, performing BIA and identifying the assets required to meet the specified RTO and RPO for her customers. About midway through her time there, Vaishali was awarded her CBCP. Equipped with a basic set of skills, she started to move up the ladder of BCP and knew that BRMA was an additional asset to boost her knowledge.
On the other side, I was a seasoned member of the BCP community, with dozens of plans, speaking engagements and articles to my name. And just like Vaishali was going to be put on the fast track due to COVID-19, I was put on the fast track some 30 years earlier after the Loma Prieta earthquake struck.
What it is All About
The BRMA mentoring program is built around both members answering a questionnaire. Mentee candidates specify the skills that they want to develop while mentors list the skills that they can offer. Some skills might be leadership, working with management and peers, developing writing and public speaking to help gain funding and support for your company’s BC program, or even learning how to contribute to the industry at large, which is a requirement of the FBCI certification.
Vashali’s specific needs were to develop leadership skills and have some assistance in writing white papers and articles.
And How it Went
At our last in-person lunch before San Francisco was shut down, Vaishali expressed concerns because she was seeing conflicting emails popping up in her inbox from all corners.
I told her that this was the time for her to reach out to her management and to gain the support to create a clearing house and central communications hub, thus shutting down the conflicting public communications. While she had some trepidation doing this, she did and it worked – which of course was a double-edged sword. Although it added substantially to her workload, acting as the clearing house for all COVID communications also gave the team control over the messaging, thus increasing its accuracy along with her visibility and worth to ServiceNow.
We won’t know the ending to this story for a while – both because of COVID and because Vaishali is just starting a leave of absence to care for an addition to her family.
But we can tell you this. The BRMA mentoring program is one of the more valuable services that this volunteer-led organization provides to its members. And there are a lot of valuable services available to all of us.
