Contingency Planning     Download

Objectives:
After successfully completing this learning module, you should be able to:
• Define contingency planning and advocate for it under the right circumstances, and give examples of its uses and limits.
• Describe contingency planning as a specific part of a larger framework of preparedness activities.
• Rationally prioritize potential hazards facing your office or community using the risk matrix and other tools, and select scenarios for which contingency planning is a useful preparedness measure.
• Understand, develop, and navigate through the process of interagency contingency planning including:
– Initiating and maintaining the planning process
– Selecting and working with planning partners
– Developing scenarios and projecting needs
– Assessing capacities and resources
– Consolidating the plan into an integrated whole
• Choose the right format for your own contingency plan according to your situation.
• Evaluate your own and other contingency plans.

Organization of this Courset:
This course is divided into 10 chapters, each one focusing on a different aspect of
contingency planning and the activities required to manage and complete it in the
field. The text is designed to be read from beginning to end, and in most instances a
reasonably good understanding of the material presented in any chapter is required
to fully appreciate the next. For the casual reader who only wants to review those
chapters of most interest, however, references to important points in previous (and, in some instances, future) chapters are included where required for full nderstanding.

Chapter 1: What is Contingency Planning? This chapter focuses on the definitions of contingency planning in use by different practitioners and explains its relationship to other preparedness activities. It also presents an overview of the IASC Cluster System to interagency contingency planning.

Chapter 2: Why and When to Plan?  This chapter provides advice on selecting scenarios suitable for contingency planning, and for deciding when such planning is actually needed.

Chapter 3: Who Are the Planners?  This chapter answers the question of who should be involved in your contingency planning process. It provides advice in choosing and working with planning partners and explains the basic partnerships and structures of the IASC cluster approach. 

Chapter 7: How to Identify Potential Response Gaps This chapter explains the Gap ID matrix and its various uses in contingency planning. It also provides guidance in writing planning objectives and strategies based on analysis of potential response gaps.

Chapter 8: How to Establish and Support Working Groups  This chapter focuses on the group and organizational dynamics associated with conducting an interagency planning process. It sets out a model for working within the IASC Cluster System with a large number of organizations.

Chapter 9: How to Consolidate the Plan It is often difficult to consolidate the final plan into a single coherent document when its parts are drafted by disparate groups and working committees. This chapter gives some advice on making the task of consolidation easier to manage. It also provides three example contingency plan outlines that serve as models for three different levels of contingency planning that you might encounter.

Chapter 10: What Next? Using the Plan and the Process This final chapter explores the different ways that contingency plans are put into effect (or not) and gives you some advice for evaluating your own and other contingency plans.