Contingency plan is designed to maintain or restore business operations in the event of emergency, system failure, or disaster. Contingency plans are often devised by governments or businesses who want to be prepared for anything that could happen.
Business Contingency Plan
Contingency planning is one part of a much broader emergency plan process that includes items such as business practices, operational continuity, and disaster recovery planning. Preparing for such events often involves implementing policies and processes at an organizational level and may require numerous plans to properly prepare for, respond to, recover from, and continue activities if impacted by an event. Project managers must also consider the impacts of disruptions and plan, in alignment with organizational standards and policies, for such events. Contingency planning should identify potential vulnerabilities and threats and then implement approaches to either prevent such incidents from happening or limit their potential impact.
Companies and organizations face many risks, they need a systematic approach to the risk management. The main considerations that you should address in a contingency plan are scope, initiation, actions, roles and responsibilities. The scope defines what particular risk the contingency plan is designed for, actions specify what sequence of actions it will take in order to control the problem and minimise its impact. The roles and responsibilities will show who do what and when. Good contingency plans are usually based on the shared experience of managers working together.
Business Contingency Plan Template
Template format: An important form of contingency plan is a business continuity plan. This is typically created to cover the most serious of problems, such as the complete loss of all your servers and network infrastructure due to a fire. Your format may need to comply with the general design
Whatever style or format you may choose for your template, it is important to include key elements: the contract list, emergency response resources and equipment, detail emergency plan and actions, person who is responsible for the actions etc
The first key area to consider is the contingency phrase. You can divide the total contingency plan into three stage: response phase, resumption phase, recovery phase and restoration phase. The plan coordinator need to work with management team and determine which Teams/Team members are responsible for each function during each phase and the resources and the procedures to deal with the situation.
The second key area to emphasis is the identification of critical factors. For the contingency plan to work, you need to work out important factors for the system to work, for example, you may need commitment from top management level and resources to help the implementation of the plan.