3 Examples of a Corrective Action Plan

John Spacey, updated on September 07, 2023

A corrective action plan is a set of actions to correct an issue, problem, non-compliance or underperformance. It is essentially a plan to improve performance and/or reduce risk. The following are illustrative examples.

Audit

It is common for an audit to produce a corrective action plan that identifies steps to correct non-conformances to a standard, principle or practice. In the example below, an information security audit has identified several poor practices and vulnerabilities. The corrective action plan maps out a path to improve information security.

The example above excludes relatively obvious information such as a target date and accountable person for each action.

Incidents & Problems

A corrective action plan is often developed in response to an incident or failure. This process begins with a root cause analysis that identifies underlying problems that represent a risk of future incidents. The following example is a corrective action plan produced in response to an outage of a software platform.

Employee Performance

An employee who receives a poor performance review may be given the chance to improve by establishing a corrective action plan that sets expectations for what is required to get back to satisfactory performance.

The actions in an employee corrective action plan are similar to regular performance objectives in that they are typically designed to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.

Overview: Corrective Action Plan
Type	Problem Management Corrective Action Performance Issue
Definition	A set of actions designed to correct an issue, problem, non-compliance or underperformance.
Related Concepts	Problem Management » Action Plan » Reduce Risk » Corrective Action » Incident Management » Root Cause Analysis »