Contingency Planning

The Risk Report is useful to pinpoint near-term risks and the priority with which they should be approached. However, it's also important to look at the bigger picture and construct a plan to handle specific scenarios that may have an extreme impact. These are called contingency plans.

One common contingency plan is a Disaster Recovery Plan. This is a document that organizations prepare that detail the specific steps taken when a disaster hits, when (more than likely) staff will not be able to come to the office and normal resources may be limited or unavailable. The risk reporting and asset details can be very useful in constructing this plan.

AssetChief provides the Planning tab to construct scenarios for contingency plans. Here you can add entries with a type called "Possibility". You would then define the scenario, and as subtasks you would add the specific steps that would be taken in case that scenario occurs.

It's common for organizations to select a small team of experienced and adaptive personnel to lead a disaster recovery - something that is often referred to as the DREAM team, the "Disaster Recovery and Emergency Action Management" team. AssetChief provides a role that you can add to users so you can easily find those who should be leading any disaster recovery plan. This can be used to assign users to individual tasks in the contingency plan.

It's also important to regularly review these contingency plans. You can do this using the What's Next / Review action. There you can specify when the next review should occur, and which role or user the review should be assigned to.