Contingency Plan
Ayoa’s Contingency Plan template will ensure that your business is adequately prepared in the event of something going wrong, so you can minimize the impact it will have on your processes, employees or customers.
What is a contingency plan?
If life teaches us one thing, it’s to expect the unexpected – and with that, unfortunately, things can always go wrong no matter how hard we’ve worked on something. This is why every business should have a contingency plan in place to ensure that they’re prepared when disaster strikes – whether this is a result of a technical error or a human one. By assessing the probability and potential impact of a range of scenarios, as well as determining the preparations you will take to avoid it and how you will respond in the event of this situation occurring, your company can be more proactive in its planning and keep business running as smoothly as possible.
Having a contingency plan is particularly helpful for marketing, public relations and customer service teams who will be communicating directly with the public in the case of something going wrong. Other names you might see a contingency plan referred to include a backup plan or a disaster recovery plan. Whatever you call yours, it’s essential to have one in place to help you keep a step ahead of potential disasters that could be easily mitigated.
Why should you have a contingency plan?
Contingency plans can help you prepare for various events that are both inside and outside of your control. These include system outages, data breaches, damage caused by fires and floods, and even simple human errors, such as sending an email to your customer base that includes incorrect information, such as a discount code that doesn’t work. Whatever the situation, having an effective disaster recovery plan will help you to react quickly and minimize damage (such as lost customers) as much as possible.
Your users or customers should be at the heart of everything you do. By being adequately prepared for disasters, you can be more likely to retain their trust by ensuring that they’re being properly communicated with at every stage. Whether it’s simply saying ‘sorry’ or reassuring your customer that you’re working hard to fix the issue as fast as possible, having your response prepared will let your customers know that you care about them.
How to use our Contingency Plan template
Our Contingency Plan template has everything you need to create an effective disaster recovery plan for various situations. Discover how to use our template below.
To access the template, sign up to Ayoa. Once you've signed up, navigate to the homepage to create a new whiteboard, mind map or task board and choose this template from the library.
Either alone or with your team, brainstorm the disasters and any other major events that could have an impact on your business and add them to the first column of the template. Consider issues caused by technology, as well as ones that can be caused by humans. Don’t forget that you can easily add and delete boxes from the template depending on how many you need!
For each scenario, rank their probability and potential impact between 1 and 10 (where 1 is near impossible/no impact and 10 is very likely to happen/very high impact). Use sticky notes to add these scores to the relevant sections of the template for each event.
Now it’s time to start planning. Using sticky notes, fill out these following sections for each of these events:
Probability: How likely is it that this event will occur? What might cause it to happen in the first place? Is there a chance of it happening more than once?
Impact: What impact will it have on your business? Will it slow down your processes or affect the morale of your employees? Will it make your customers less likely to stay loyal to your brand and switch to a competitor?
Preparation: How can you prepare for this event occurring? Try to consider if anything can be done to avoid it in the first place.
Response: How will you respond to this event occurring? What specific actions will you take? Who will you communicate with? What channels will you use?
Once your contingency plan is ready, get to work ensuring that you will be able to implement the right responses if one of these scenarios were to occur. Use Ayoa to turn these into tasks, assign them to members of your team, and add start dates, due dates, reminders, notes, and more.
