Business Contingency Plan Examples: Prepare for the unexpected

Designed specifically for small businesses, this template uses a pre-built, all-inclusive contingency plan to provide guidance for modestly sized organizations. Take the guesswork out of creating a contingency plan from scratch, and leverage the advantages of this small-business-specific template. Contingency plans offer organizations a proactive strategy for resuming daily functions and operations following unforeseen events.

Contingency planning vs risk management

Initially, the company failed to communicate its intentions, leading to legal actions and widespread criticism. Apple later apologized, offered discounted battery replacements, and introduced a feature allowing users to disable performance throttling. Zoom quickly responded by halting feature development for 90 days to focus on security improvements, introducing end-to-end encryption, and enhancing user controls. CEO Eric Yuan personally addressed concerns and communicated updates transparently. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Zoom saw a surge in users but faced a crisis when security flaws led to “Zoombombing” incidents, where unauthorized users disrupted meetings.

It involves identifying potential risks early, monitoring them closely, and preparing a plan of action. This usually means setting up a risk register to track issues and tackle them before they become big problems. A business impact analysis (BIA) considers how different disruptions could impact your business. It’s about identifying your most essential functions and determining what would happen if they were interrupted — like lost sales, delayed orders, or frustrated customers. By doing a BIA, you get a clear picture of what’s on the line, helping you prioritize your continuity plan to keep the most important parts of your business running smoothly. A BCP is a comprehensive strategy designed to help organizations stay resilient when disruptions arise.

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• This first step is the most important aspect of your planning, as it sets the tone for why your plans need to exist in the first place.
• Simply put, a contingency plan is an action plan designed to help organizations respond to a potential future incident.
• It centralizes critical information and communication protocols, enabling quick and efficient access during emergencies.
• If the BIA indicates that it’s a high percentage, the company will most likely want to prioritize creating a contingency plan for this business risk.
• Business contingency planning is work an organization does to determine how it responds to future events that might affect the business.
• Samsung responded by halting production, offering full refunds, and implementing an eight-point battery safety check to prevent future incidents.

If you want your contingency plans to protect your business, you have to keep them up to date. That means you’ll need to schedule regular reviews of the plan to check that it’s still relevant and aligned with your changing business. Let’s cover the basic contingency planning process and detail how to get yours up and running. Then you should have a supply chain contingency plan in place, in case of unexpected production or shipping delays. Follow these seven steps to develop your contingency plan, from creating a policy state and implementing preventive controls to testing and training employees and maintaining your contingency plan. Learn what a contingency plan is and how to go about creating one for your company.

Create Business Contingency Plan

• It’s great if you’ve created contingency plans for all the risks you found, but make sure you’re constantly monitoring for new risks.
• Strategic planning plays an essential role in managing plausible problems in the industry.
• These plans hedge against supply chain disruptions caused by events like natural disasters or technological outages and help organizations reduce downtime and ensure real-time operational capabilities.
• Get essential insights to help your security and IT teams better manage risk and limit potential losses.
• The right tools can transform the complexity of risk management into a structured, data-driven process.
• Creating an effective BCP requires a step-by-step approach that addresses your organization’s unique needs and risks.

In some cases, when a specific risk is highly likely, specific plans may be required to address that scenario. For instance, you may want a specific plan if your premises are located in an area likely to be targeted by terrorists or at high flood risk. For example, if a cyberattack disrupts access to key systems, your recovery strategy might include using secure backup data centers and deploying temporary access protocols.

Mastering Contingency Planning: Expert Strategies, Proven Best Practices, and Testing Techniques for Optimal Results

Determining exactly what makes your business tick will help you create a contingency plan for every risk, no matter the likelihood or severity. IBM Maximo Application Suite is an integrated cloud-based solution that helps businesses respond quickly to changing conditions. Here are some important definitions, best practices and strong examples to help you build contingency plans for whatever your business faces. Future-proofing crisis management requires businesses to be proactive, adaptable, and responsive. Cybersecurity threats, misinformation, and social media backlash demand adaptive strategies. This crisis management approach helped Zoom regain trust and reinforced the importance of acknowledging mistakes, prioritizing user safety, and taking swift corrective action.

Examine each critical function and determine the potential consequences and how quickly you need to recover each one. All of this helps to safeguard your company’s revenue and reputation – and it doesn’t happen without preparation. Discover how IBM Storage Defender SaaS Essentials Edition can accelerate your approach to data resilience. Learn about the capabilities provided by IBM Storage Defender to help your organization build and deliver data resilience.

It also includes a comprehensive version history slide including your presentation plan’s version, approved by, revision date, descriptions of changes, author, prepared by, and approved by sections. Keep everyone in the loop with this easy-to-use contingency plan presentation template. Use this simple examples of contingency plans in business contingency plan template to help your organization return to daily operations after unforeseen circumstances. Find sections for business impact analysis (BIA), recovery strategies, plan development, and testing and exercises.

For example, you may experience a significant increase in revenue during a specific period due to changes in market behavior. This is a good scenario, but you will still need to adapt your operations to scale and appropriately meet the new demands of your growing audience. Understanding the severity and likelihood of each risk will help you determine exactly how you will need to proceed to minimize the impact of the threat to your business. Rather than building one contingency plan, you should build one plan for each type of large-scale risk or disaster that might strike.

Weigh risks based on severity and likelihood

Your plan won’t be a success unless there is buy-in from key members of your team and management. Once all parties agree that the course of action described in the contingency plan works for everyone, you can move forward with confidence. Risk management is the identification, mitigation, and assessment of potential risks that may affect your organization. This process helps an organization prevent losses before they occur and aids in assessing whether or not certain risks are worth taking. Contingency planning can be a component of risk management since that process helps organizations survive these potential risks.

Learn more about important components and how to write an effective contingency plan in this all-inclusive guide to writing contingency plans. A contingency plan covers the important risks the organization is monitoring and any possible triggers to those risks. It also outlines the specific actions organization staff will take to respond to them. Once you have completed the contingency plans using work plan template, make sure that they are quickly accessible to all employees and stakeholders.

When each member of your team knows exactly what to do and whom to contact, you can manage stakeholder communications with precision and authority. Contingency plan examples can help your team understand what to consider in creating a plan and the important components to include. Join over thousands of organizations that use Creately to brainstorm, plan, analyze, and execute their projects successfully. Consider what needs to be done in order to resume normal operations after the impact of  the event. When starting a project or business, most people plan according to the status quo. Unfortunately, that’s a best-case scenario and not helpful in the real world.