Problems and Contingency Plans

Don’t assume that your plans or schedule will always go smoothly. Consider some of the things that may happen:

• competitors cut prices in response to your company’s aggressive marketing campaign
• a strike on the waterfront leaves you without materials needed by your factory
• a key employee resigns
• flu sweeps though the work team and there’s a rise in sick leave
• rising interest rates reduce demand for your product
• drought increases the price of required commodities
• there is an extended period without gas or electricity.

Good planners expect the unexpected. They ask ‘what if?’ questions to better understand the problems that they may encounter. For example, ‘What if our main competitor drops prices in response to our advertising campaign?’ and ‘What if interest rates rise by more than two per cent?’

Unexpected events don’t have to stop us from achieving our goals. What we need are contingency plans to deal with such events. A contingency plan identifies possible changes in the internal or external environment of an organisation, and the action that you should take to deal with the situation. For example, you might need to hire additional workers if demand pushes up sales above the anticipated levels.

Activity

Think about a goal that you have not been able to achieve in the past, and consider why you were not able to achieve it. Share your ideas in the forum.

• What were the factors that made it difficult to achieve this goal?
• How could you have overcome these obstacles?

To help plan for contingencies, identify the factors that you can control, as well as the uncontrollable factors, such as economic recession, technological developments, or accidents. When you have identified these factors, you can then plan a worst-case scenario to minimise their impact.

The next step after identifying possible obstacles is to develop a contingency plan to cope with their occurrence.

Ultimately, your chosen solution should be based on careful consideration of the advantages and disadvantages of each alternative. You need to evaluate each alternative on its:

• feasibility
• quality
• acceptability
• costs
• reversibility
• ethics.

It might sound difficult, but decision-making can be easier — you need to use the skills of other team members. If you develop contingency plans collaboratively within work groups, it is likely to produce more complete information.

Activity

Identify two current short-term or long-term work goals in your job or organisation, and think about what might possibly go wrong in the future. What obstacles are likely? (Don’t be afraid to let your imagination run wild! Often unforeseeable factors are so unlikely that we refuse to consider them, and so we are unprepared.). Share your thoughts in the forum.

Now it’s your turn

Prior to moving on to the next topic, have a conversation with someone that is not in Human Resources or studying this qualification and in your own words:

• Think about an occasion where something didn’t go to plan at work and discuss
  • what happened?
  • why did it happen?
  • what was the outcome?
  • how could the issue have been avoided or mitigated?
  • have you introduced any planning to prevent the same thing happening again?