Week 4
September 25, 2015
Contingency Planning…..Do you have Good Plan
“B”?
Most of the business like
to have events take place routinely without to many changes, variations or
problems, but do you think that happens in your real practice? Events don’t
always go routinely as planned. The entire incident and its outcome differ
according to the set of circumstances, which varies every time. A contingency
plan is designed to help organization respond effectively to a significant
future events, or situation that may or may not happen.
So, risk management concept
emerged as a part of Contingency planning, which provides a dynamic attribute
to the event and circumstances. Risk management helps to reduce uncertainty,
preserve assets, and identify risk to achieve organizations mission. But it
seems like organization always omits the important factor on their plan, “What
If?” This two critical words are the essence of risk management and provide a different
perspective to Plan A. What if your Plan A does not work as planned? So, it is important to understand that
risk management practice provides the foundation for plan A and your Contingency
plan provides the platform for “Plan B”.
During the various practices,
risk management realized that different risk situations require different level
of response and different approach to deal the situation. As a result,
organizations emerged with emergency plans, crisis management plans, and
disaster plans.
Emergency plan deals with
contingencies, which may occur or may not, so policies and procedures to
reduce, prevent, and control risk need to mentioned as the Plan A. so,
Emergency Plan, or Plan B emerges to respond to situations, if Plan A doesn’t
go as planned accordingly.
A crisis occurs when the
threat is not eliminated by the emergency plan and some impact occurs. As risk
management and contingency plans focus on the control and manage risk per-loss,
crisis management engages in controlling and managing risks post-loss. So
crisis management plan will help organization to plan for after math event and
will be an effective tool to find out answers for what do you do now?
Lets see a latest disaster
of example California wild fire. The emergency plan came to action as fire
started and the crisis begins as the people started suffer financially and
emotionally with the loss of their property and loved ones, which was the
evident of disaster affecting hundreds of houses and thousands of acres of land
and forest. So how would you manage under such circumstances?
And it is true, as the
things changes the risk factors starts threatening your organizations, which
automatically trigger your emergency plan, crisis plan, and disaster plan as an
essential for your Contingency plan or Plan B. So, it is important to think about Plan B as it is like Plan
A, because your Plan B has a critical role to your recovery as plan A. So, do
your organization has a Plan B in place? When was the last time your
organization have reviewed your emergency, crisis management, and disaster
plans? Its never too late to start thinking about it and planning for your Plan
B. Your small effort of thought “What if” could help to deal with uncanny
situations in future.
References:
Michael E. Whitman and Herbert J.
Mattord, “ Management of Information
Security”, Published by
Cengage Learning, Fourth Edition
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