Contingency plans are an important part of your overall business continuity strategy because they help ensure your organization is ready for anything. Many large businesses and government organizations create multiple sets of contingency plans so that a variety of potential threats are well-researched and their responses are fully practiced before a crisis hits. Think of contingency planning as a proactive strategy, whereas crisis management—the other piece of the business continuity puzzle—is more of a reactive strategy.
A contingency plan helps to ensure you are prepared for what may come; a crisis management plan empowers you to manage the response after the incident occurs. Creating a contingency plan requires a bit of research and planning. However, working ahead on each plan will be worth it in the long run. To create a contingency plan for your organization, follow this five-step framework:.
First, do a little research throughout your organization to identify and prioritize the resources that your organization cannot do without, such as employees, IT systems, and specific facilities and physical assets. Next, identify the potential threats to these critical resources. Meet with employees, executives, IT and other key personnel to gain a holistic idea of the events that could impact your resources. If necessary, consider bringing in a consultant who specializes in identifying risk.
Ideally, you would then write out a contingency plan for each of the identified risks. Then, over time you can work toward drafting plans for each lower-priority risk.
When a crisis happens, the easiest and most natural reaction is to panic if you do not have a clear plan of action to follow. However, with a well-thought-out plan, employees can react faster, think on their feet and speed up recovery operations to avert the crisis in good time. Rather than wait for instructions from elsewhere, everyone knows where to go, what to do, and how to do it so that order is restored promptly.
In the end, this quick and orderly reaction minimizes losses, saves on costs and ensures timely restoration of business operations. This is to ensure proper alignment with the changing market needs. Instead of taking too long to move from ineffective business models to more effective ones, contingency plans save you time by guiding you through the transition process into better systems and strategies that are more profitable.
In this sense, a contingency plan is like a gear lever for switching business gears and finding a more profitable solution. Without contingency plans, your organization will forever remain locked in the same money-draining business strategies that no longer work. This is why contingency planning should be a critical component of your business strategy.
Contingency planning not only entails preparing for disasters, but it also encompasses opportunity planning. Opportunity planning is a methodical approach that involves analyzing different market parameters to identify opportunities your organization can exploit. By identifying and taking advantage of these opportunities, your organization will maximize its profit potential and gain new customers in the process. Take for instance a bank. If it cannot assure its customers of the security of their funds regardless of future circumstances, then the customers will presumably take their money elsewhere.
This will, in turn, improve their reputation and retain customers. As part of the HIPAA contingency plan, it is crucial to identify what applications and data are critical for the contingency plan, to test the contingency plan, and revise any identified deficiencies. When implementing a contingency plan, it is necessary to establish guidelines and procedures, such as:.
When a contingency plan is created and implemented into the organization, communicate the plan with the organization and explain the responsibilities under the plan, set a test schedule for the plan to identify any issues and the effectiveness of the plan, and review the plan on a regular basis, especially when there are any organizational changes that may affect the plan.
Create a contingency plan now. Do not wait for an emergency to happen.
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