When a plan comes together

Posted on July 2, 2010 by admin

Even if the employees are not directly responsible for implementing the plan, in the event of an emergency and a panic an employee who has not been briefed in the basics may do something that endangers the entire plan.A method should also be devised to handle feedback. The more complex a plan is, the more chance there will be that questions will be asked, and it is important that these not be left to personnel trainers who themselves may not be fully familiar with all aspects of the plan.

There is also the chance that feedback will uncover flaws that the contingency manager may have missed in the plan; inevitably when many minds focus on a particular aspect they have a much higher chance of picking up things a single mind may have missed; this is not something to be feared, since such feedback can be used to improve the overall plan providing it is not ignored or belittled.

Depending on the company, once training has been implemented it may be desirable – it may even be a legal requirement – to test the procedure by holding drills. This is another valuable resource for feedback and for adjusting a plan where difficulties are uncovered putting into practice something that appeared very simple in theory.

Even if the drills work flawlessly it is still worth examining what happened during each drill to see whether there is room for improvements. Very few plans ever work completely flawlessly, and the metaphorical devil can be in the details; Badly labeled emergency exits may not be recognized as exits in the heat of the moment, and a small, inexpensive adjustment – in this case better signage – may be the key to rectifying the problem in a drill rather than leaving the problem still liable to confuse matters in the event the plan is for real rather than being a drill.

Another thing to be aware of is the chance that a part of the drill may itself lead to unexpected consequences, which may also need to be addressed. A badly positioned, overly loud evacuation alarm near a muster point may create so much noise that it breaches legislation governing the exposure of employees to loud noises, and may open the way to legal claims for damaged hearing.

Although it can be difficult to plan for, the human error factor needs to be a consideration in both how good the overall plan is, and how well employees have been trained for such a plan. In an industrial plant an emergency plan might call for the controlled shutdown of certain pieces of plant machinery; what happens to the plan if an employee trained to shut down a specific piece of machinery is on a break or is not at their post when the emergency alarms begin sounding? How will that affect the plan, and should the employee be trained that the need for them to shut down that piece of equipment is greater than their need to evacuate?

In addition there is always the issue of a “good Samaritan” employee – one who decides that, even though they are untrained, they should shut down the equipment that has been left because there is nobody else present to do that, and inadvertently but with the best of intentions uses the controls wrongly and complicates the issue.

With all these potentials, even when the initial plan has been completed there is no place for complacency. The plan may need to be adjusted, and in worst case scenarios may even need to be scrapped and started over from scratch, and a responsible contingency planning manager cannot afford to regard his job as over the second his plan is published. Employees change, good trainers leave and bad ones may replace them, equipment grows older and less reliable and the good contingency plan needs to evolve to meet these new challenges as and when they occur.

Each time the plan is tested, feedback needs to be gathered, analyzed and assessed for potential inclusion or adjustment of the overall plan in future. A plan must never be regarded as unchangeable since the business world is forever changing; safety legislation may not be the same tomorrow as it is today. A plan may start off solid, but unless nurtured and adjusted to fit changing circumstances the plan becomes unworkable. Stay aware of changes and be flexible in adapting, and the plan will continue to serve the company for decades to come.

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Final tweaks

Posted on July 2, 2010 by admin

When the contingency plan is as good as it can be made, the final stage of the procedure is the day to day adjustment of the plan to keep it current. By this stage, the actual plan has been finalized, employees have been trained in its implementation and feedback from drills has indicated that the plan works.But complacency is the major danger now. Just because it works today does not mean it will work tomorrow.

Vigilance needs to be maintained of such factors as changing legislation, aging equipment and differences in personnel. Feedback from trainers may lead to better procedures for explaining the plan to new employees. A major industrial accident that occurs at a rival company may lead to reviews of safety procedures and reports that can be of use in fine tuning your own plan. Never be afraid to learn from others mistakes, it helps ensure that you don’t repeat the same mistakes.

The contingency planning manager needs to remain in regular contact with a number of other departments; the legal department for feedback on legislative changes, the training department for feedback on training, the personnel department for feedback on key employees that may be part of the plan who change from time to time. Ultimately the planning manager also has to be contactable by individual employees whose concerns should be considered because ultimately these employees are the front line in carrying out the plan – if they have no faith in it, their enthusiasm at carrying it out may be dampened leading to problems not because the plan is flawed, but because its execution is less than fully carried out. The morale of employees should never become a factor that itself could threaten the execution of a plan ultimately designed to safeguard those same employees as much as to safeguard the smooth running of the company.

Any changes to the plan also have to go through the concept, assessment and execution feedback stages; the completed plan should be an ongoing, evolving thing. Granted there is less work to keep a good plan up to date than there is to design it in the first place, but it is still an ongoing workload with milestones that can be set a period of time after each drill, and an ongoing project that should never completely end.

Company expansion, especially into different sectors may also be a factor that requires the plan to be adjusted, sometimes extensively. The first plan a company designs and implements in its lifetime should only be the building block for more extensive plans as the company expands, and adjusts to new climates; as such it is vital that this building block be stable and well crafted. Some expansions may be failures but this does not necessarily mean that those parts of the plan should completely be scrapped, especially if the alterations could be easily and effectively related to similar kinds of expansion which may be successful. There is no point in doing the same planning twice, if there is already something similar that worked that can be easily adapted.

New markets opening up present new challenges and may present new aspects that a contingency plan has to consider, even from an early stage. It is too late to start planning contingency when the danger a contingency is to address is present, for the plan to be effective it needs to begin concept planning the moment a new potential change or threat can be identified. Even if parts of the plan end up being rolled back it is important that those parts be there in the first place.

A well documented plan that is running well and only needs adjusting from time to time is also much easier to pass on to another manager in the event of retirement or management personnel changes. Coherency and simplicity are key factors that should be aimed for; an easily summarized plan is much easier to follow than a complex plan made of many stages, factors to consider in implementing and potential failure points.

The final tweaks part of contingency planning should be the last, but ongoing stage. The plan has been designed, it has been tested, the testing and drills have been evaluated and any problems fixed and now the plan is as good as it can be, the employees are trained to carry it out smoothly and effectively and have demonstrated that they are familiar and comfortable with it. We have finally reached the end of the process that started as a few ideas on paper and has become almost a living entity, an adaptable, continuously evolving plan that is well placed to carry the business it has been designed for into the uncertain future that lies before every business, large and small.

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The price of safety

Posted on July 2, 2010 by admin

The recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has brutally brought to the forefront of people’s minds what price can and should be put on safety. Eleven people lost their lives immediately, and the aftermath threatens the livelihood of thousands more as well as potentially hundreds of thousands of animals, fish and square kilometers of wildlife reserve.There is an important axiom in business that there is no point in spending too little on a solution that ends up not working when it is called upon, and that axiom suggests that it would be worthwhile overspending on a solution since doing so also incorporates a sum to cover risk, and if one is going to incorporate such a sum anyway one might as well use that to widen the budget and buy a better product or solution.

Depending on the sector of business, the costs of safety may only need to take into account the safety of the companies own employees, or the solution could be vastly more expensive because it also must ensure the safety of the public or the environment. Even if a business is not brought to a standstill itself by an emergency such as a spillage, this does not diminish the emergency of the spillage which may have later effects such as fines or cleanup costs that, although they don’t stop the business, can damage its profits, reputation and standing.

All of these things can have a cascading effect – a company that does not maintain high standards and be seen to do so, may lose business purely on this reputation. It may be able to handle the contract from a practical point of view, but may find itself eliminated from the bidding if the contract is environmentally or politically sensitive purely for having the “wrong” reputation.

From these factors along we can see that the answer to the question “what price for safety?” is not an easy question to answer. Clearly solutions must take into account all of these factors which will affect not only the price of the solution but could potentially drive up the costs of implementing it – but equally, can a company really afford not to spend the extra resources, since if it does not and the worst case does happen it has effectively consigned itself to huge drops in profit, if not potential bankruptcy .

Plus there is the legal standpoint. The law is unrelenting when it comes to safety, particularly public safety. Some types of companies can even be forced to close until they comply with safety laws by government inspectors, some of whom are not obliged to provide any warning of impending inspection and assessment. A contingency put in place to safeguard the health and lives of workers that fails is going to lead to investigations, fines, loss of reputation and the subsequent damage that can take years of careful rebuilding to undo. Such a contingency was not only ineffective but was a waste of money from the start since it was money spent that ultimately, when the solution was implemented, proved to be a waste of resources from the outset.

Another factor in even the most efficient and effective safety procedure is that without the proper training to carry it out it is doomed to fail, not because it is bad or ineffective but because money was incorrectly saved in teaching the employees how to effectively implement the solution. In this case the contingency plan itself may have been adequate, but failed only due to lack of resources allocated to training. This can lead to arguments between departments about whose budget is used to train workers to deal with the contingency solution; the training department or the contingency planning department. Such conflict may, in multinational companies, be inevitable but should always be minimized lest it end up becoming a danger in itself and threatening the solution altogether.

Ultimately a solution that, in its implementation, puts employees potentially in more danger than not using that solution is not a viable solution, because should an accident occur in the implementation it compounds the problem rather than solving the problem. Thus, safety should be the paramount deciding factor on whether or not a solution is viable or workable.

As British Petroleum found out with the Deepwater Horizon, discussion of what safety measures could have been put in place after something has gone wrong is ultimately more damaging than carefully planning before a project starts what safety measures can be put in place that may be used in the event of emergency. From equipment to employee training to a solid plan, safety must play a part in the contingency plan from start to finish. If it does not, the effects can be catastrophic both immediately and for years or even decades to come.

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