Contingency planning – I am sure everyone has done it in some form. We do it in our personal lives, we do it in our professional lives, and we do it in our recreational lives. Some classic examples include:
+ a backup plan for rain for an outdoor wedding (alternative plan)
+ strapping knees or ankles to minimise the chance of injury (risk reduction)
+ buying insurance (compensation)
+ building fire drills and evacuation drills (law, good practice, risk reduction)
Project Management is a discipline that requires almost continual and ongoing contingency planning (many project managers will question my use of the word “almost”).
A friend (that also delivers training) recently was caught in a situation where he had absolutely no contingency plan. He was delivering an in-house course, and the class had to be cancelled on the morning of the first day. Seems over 70% of the delegates had come down with the flu bug that was going around. I am aware of training classes that have been cancelled because of instructor illness, but not because of participant illness. He was telling me there was no contingency plan – a special case negotiation was required. Thankfully all parties were reasonable and it was resolved quickly.
But one of the most interesting contingency planning that I have observed is for Asset Management – especially for large assets. Maintenance planning is a big part of asset management – determining if maintenance can be done without a shutdown, predicting the impact of an unplanned outage DURING the maintenance activity, developing contingency options (ranging from leasing equipment to increased warehouse inventories) – and I am amazed at how well it is often done.
Weather contingencies are also an interesting part of asset management. The ability of a facility to cope with predicted wild weather events, and the ability of the asset management team to cope with these predicted wild weather events is another area that I see if often done well. Only the largest of predicted wild weather events tends to have significant impact on assets. And I emphasise predicted because unpredicted wild weather events (such as storms caused by volcanic eruptions or very localised events like tornados) are almost unpredictable, or not predictable enough in advance to be considered predictable.
How am I dealing with contingencies in my business?
+ I try to not have one customer provide over 25% of my income. If that customer has a bad year or worse, goes bankrupt my exposure is reduced to a manageable level. And we are trying to get this number down closer to 15%.
+ I am developing the skills of a colleague to deliver my webcasts. This is for any unforseen circumstance which preclude me from delivering a webcast such as illness. It ensures product delivery to the customer.
+ I minimise the number of times I fly on low-cost carriers. This is simply because of their flight cancellation policies as opposed to on-time arrival or lost luggage statistics. A late flight can be managed. A cancelled flight may not be an option. I have had no problems scheduling alternatives for full fare carriers that cancel a flight (for example, pilot illness), but have had severe problems when this occurs with a low cost carrier. By the way – flying a day early means an extra day away from family, so is therefore not really an option but would make travel almost fail safe.
+ I use clouds for data storage, in addition to hard drive storage and conventional backups.
But I do not know how to develop a contingency for when the entire training class gets ill. Sometimes we have bad luck.