Contingency plan template

Planning for future business initiatives should include crafting a backup plan in the event something doesn’t go as planned. With a contingency plan template, your team can quickly establish and launch a backup strategy in the event that a roadblock occurs.

What is a contingency plan template?

A contingency plan template is a replicable outline of a contingency plan that you can use in case of an unexpected emergency, such as a response plan to natural disasters. Creating a contingency plan template can help prevent your business from experiencing major risk. This way, if you’re faced with an emergency, your team has a strategy in place to keep your business functioning.It’s not enough to just have a plan—if there’s an emergency, you need to move quickly. With a collaborative work management platform, your team members can have access to the information they need in the event of an emergency.

What is a contingency plan?

A contingency plan is a strategy you create for your team or business in the event that something disrupts regular business operations. Think of a contingency plan as the “Plan B” for regular business operations—it’s the plan that you create to keep things running even if something prevents your business from operating normally.

What’s the difference between a business contingency plan and a business continuity plan?

While they sound similar, contingency plans and continuity plans are two separate strategies put in place to help keep a business running. Teams create a contingency in advance of a disruption to prepare for potential future issues. Contingency plans often require an incident to meet certain criteria before the plan is enacted. A contingency plan is only enacted if a scenario meets a certain criteria. When teams develop the contingency plan, they also develop the criteria a situation needs to meet before that plan is executed. 

A continuity plan is a solution that’s put in place during an incident to help keep the business running. While a contingency plan requires that a situation meets certain requirements before it is enacted, a continuity plan does not. This means that your team can start implementing a continuity plan as soon as something starts to go awry.

Why use a contingency plan template?

Using a contingency plan template provides you with a few different benefits.

• Ensure every plan has the relevant information: When you use a contingency plan template to develop your strategy, you’ll have key elements, such as a scenario criteria, and the strategy needed to keep the business running. This ensures that every plan will have all of the information the team needs to enact the plan.

• Standardize formatting: When all contingency plans are organized in a similar manner, team members will know exactly where to find the information they need when they need to enact a contingency plan. In times of crisis, people sometimes don’t think clearly. Having information organized in a similar manner helps take the cognitive work away from finding the information you need.

• Simplify plan creation: When you create a contingency plan template in a digital work management platform like Asana, you can create full contingency plans quickly and easily. Simply duplicate the template and then add in the relevant information to that specific plan.

Integrated features

• Project Brief. A project brief is a way to communicate important details and dates to your broader project team. Make sure your team can easily access your project brief by putting it in a central source of truth like Asana.

• Approvals. Sometimes you don’t just need to complete a task—you need to know if a deliverable is approved or not. Approvals are a special type of task in Asana with options to “Approve,” “Request changes,” or “Reject” the task. That way, task owners get clear instructions on what actions they should take and whether their work has been approved or not. 

• Custom fields. Custom fields are the best way to tag, sort, and filter work. Create unique custom fields for any information you need to track—from priority and status to email or phone number. Use custom fields to sort and schedule your to-dos so you know what to work on first. Plus, share custom fields across tasks and projects to ensure consistency across your organization. 

• Messaging. Need to share information that isn’t actionable? Try Messages in Asana. Messages enable you to communicate within Asana about non-actionable work. You can send messages to any combination of individuals, teams, and projects, so everyone is on the same page. Link to tasks, projects, and Goals in Asana to make it easy for your message recipients to gain context and drill down into the details.

Recommended apps 

• Vimeo. Text may get the point across, but written words lack tone, emotion, and expression. With video messaging in Asana, powered by Vimeo, you can give your team all the context they need, without having to schedule another meeting. Record short video messages of yourself, your screen—or both—then embed the videos in tasks, projects, messages, and comments to provide additional clarity and context. A transcript of the recording is automatically created by Asana, making it readable and searchable. Give feedback, ask questions, and assign tasks—all without leaving Asana.

• Google Workplace. Attach files directly to tasks in Asana with the Google Workplace file chooser, which is built into the Asana task pane. Easily attach any My Drive file with just a few clicks.

• Slack. Turn ideas, work requests, and action items from Slack into trackable tasks and comments in Asana. Go from quick questions and action items to tasks with assignees and due dates. Easily capture work so requests and to-dos don’t get lost in Slack. 

• Microsoft Teams. With the Microsoft Teams + Asana integration, you can search for and share the information you need without leaving Teams. Easily connect your Teams conversations to actionable items in Asana. Plus, create, assign, and view tasks during a Teams Meeting without needing to switch to your browser.

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