The first step in Contingency Planning is to conduct a risk analysis, which includes identifying all of the risks potentially confronting your organization and analyzing the consequences of each. Important areas of risk to include in the analysis would be natural disasters, cyberattacks or other forms of data loss, product recalls, workplace injuries or accidents, and personnel issues, such as dangerous employees or the loss of senior leadership. Once the risk analysis is completed, it is necessary to prioritize the risks by elevating the ones that are most probable and disruptive and creating contingency plans for those first. In Contingency Planning, it is important to have different options for different scenarios, and to address several critical matters, including what level of business operations are possible to maintain, what the trigger points will be to implement the contingency plan, what the step-by-step procedures are across time intervals (first hour, day, week, etc.), as well as defining the point at which you will be able to return to normal operations. Once the plans have been developed, it is necessary to communicate and distribute the plans across the organization, train staff in implementation and rehearse the responses, as well as maintaining and updating the plan on a continuous basis. Note, these are just a few of the considerations that must be taken into account in Contingency Planning.

Strategists looking to avoid catastrophes and black swan events must typically conduct risk analysis activities to develop a fully-fledged Contingency Plan. The data that goes into this type of risk analysis provides strategists with a probability chart that maps the impact of risk on the x-axis and the probability of occurrence on the y-axis for each risk. When a Contingency Plan is developed properly, strategists can quickly see which events have the highest impact and likelihood of occurrence and would comprise your top priorities. With this in mind, it is vitally important that business leaders and strategy teams develop Contingency Plans which support their long-term strategic goals.  

Using the new online Contingency Plan template from Praxie not only empowers strategists to keep their Contingency Plans up to date, but it also allows for ongoing collaboration and cooperation if any of these actions take place. Get started with our Contingency Planning template. 

How to use it: 

1. Assess different scenarios as the focus for your contingency plan by entering the scenarios, assessing their risk levels, and identifying specific trigger points and end triggers for each.  
2. Create a contingency plan for your priority scenario(s).​ 
3. Create an action plan focused on creating and implementing your Contingency Plan. 

Unlike most traditional Contingency Planning techniques, Praxie’s online Contingency Planning collaboration tools allow any team or organization to instantly begin working with our web templates and input forms. Our digital platform goes far beyond other software tools by including progress dashboards, data integration from existing documents or other SaaS software, elegant intuitive designs, and full access on any desktop or mobile device.