Event
The organizers of an industry conference identify major risks that could derail the event with a contingency plan that includes a risk response and preparation steps.| Contingency Plan - Industry Conference | ||
Risk | Preparation | Response |
Disaster or severe weather event. | Include the right to cancel in the event of a disaster or severe weather event. | Communicate cancellation in a timely manner. |
Facility closure | Include penalties in contract with vendor. Include the possibility of facility problems in insurance coverage. | Reschedule event at a comparable facility. If the dates need to be changed offer the choice of a refund. |
Event host or keynote speaker cancels at the last moment. | Develop a deep list of potential guest speakers who could fill in. | Ask a guest speaker to fill in. |
Catering fails to show up or deliver. | Develop a list of local restaurants that can provide acceptable food for the event on a pickup basis on short notice. | Substitute by picking up food and beverages from multiple local restaurants. |
Network failure | Make it a requirement that facilities provide two separate WIFI networks on two different backbones. | Switch to secondary network. |
Operations
A manufacturing team identifies risks to their monthly production targets with a contingency plan for each risk. The contingency plan includes an estimate of risk probability.| Contingency Plan - Manufacturing | ||
Risk | Probability | Plan |
A large number of employees call in sick for a shift. | High | Develop a call tree for asking workers to come in for an unscheduled shift.Develop an incentive plan for taking unscheduled shifts.Design modified production processes for smaller shifts. |
A machine breaks down. | High | Hold parts, components and cold standbys in inventory for rapid maintenance.Develop workaround processes to keep lines running where possible.Maintenance teams for every shift.Escalate problems to machine vendors. |
Power outage | Medium | Emergency backup power for critical machines to prevent safety risks. |
System or network outage. | High | All networks and systems to be designed with hot backups.Switch to backup and escalate to IT. |
Business Continuity
Business continuity is the process of continuing business operations in the event of disasters and other high impact issues. In this case, a continuity plan may be structured by scenario as opposed to the risks that can trigger such scenarios. It is also common to include an analysis of impact for each risk.| Contingency Plan - Business Continuity | ||
Scenario | Impact | Plan |
West data center goes down. | Low. May lose a small amount of data and experience a business disruption of several minutes. | Synchronization of data between East and West data centers.Switch all operations to East data center. |
East data center goes down. | Low. May lose a small amount of data and experience a business disruption of several minutes. | Synchronization of data between East and West data centers.Switch all operations to West data center. |
Both East and West data centers go down for an extended period of time. | High. Expect a total outage of up to a day. | Cold backups to third party cloud providers.Communicate extended outage to stakeholders.Restore limited functionality from cold standby site at the New York office. |
New York office, East and West data centers are unavailable for an extended period. | Very High. Expect an outage of a week or more. | Cold backups to third party cloud providers.Communicate extended outage to stakeholders.Use emergency communication tools to organize employees from home and plan a response.Build new environments from cold backups. |
| Overview: Contingency Plan | ||
Type | ||
Definition (1) | A plan to recover from realized risk. | |
Definition (2) | A plan to recover from potential issues and disasters. | |
Related Concepts | ||
