Contingency Plan

A plan for what is required to recover the project should an identified risk materialise. The plan must include any mitigation required to carry out the plan.

For example, if our plan for a fire includes the use of fire-extinguishers, then our plan must include the installation and maintenance of those fire-extinguishers and training the staff in their use. Without the up front mitigation, the plan would be unworkable in practice.

The total cost of a ContingencyPlan in terms of budget and schedule is known as the impact of the risk.

Creation of the contingency plan (contingency planning) is synonymous with 'disaster recovery planning', the latter perhaps inferring that all issues are large scale and critical, which they are not. This in turn is considered to be part of the wider science of 'business continuity planning', which, as the term infers, is the process of attempting to ensure business operations are not disrupted.

The subtle difference, of course, is that the focus of disaster recovery, and to a degree contingency planning, is in recovery, rather than continuity.

Although the processes are the same for mitigation of project risk with respect to disruption, again the focus can be slightly different.

So what of the process for contingency planning itself? The Online Business Continuity Guide (http://www.yourwindow.to/business-continuity/) states that this comprises 7 project phases: Initiating the BCP Project; Assessing Business Risk and Impact of Potential Emergencies; Preparing for a Possible Emergency; Disaster Recovery Phase; Business Recovery Phase; Testing the Business Recovery Process; Training Staff in the Business Recovery Process; Keeping the Plan Up-to-date).

Again, the terminology is not always familiar in a project risk scenario, but the processes will be the same.

External Links

[http://www.bitpipe.com/rlist/term/Disaster-Recovery.html | Browse the latest reports below to find Disaster Recovery white papers, product literature, webcasts, and case studies.]

See AnatomyOfRisk, RiskManagement