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.