Strategic / contingency planning playbook

“A contingency plan is a plan devised for an outcome other than in the usual (expected) plan.”
Websters dictionary.

This week we’ve used the metaphors of black swans, elephants in the room and boiling frogs to highlight some of the challenges that could be faced by the OSS industry.

Once you’ve gone through your own version of this risk profiling exercise, the next step is to turn it into a contingency playbook. There are three main categories of risk event that you may consider building your plans around:

• A major event that impacts your network and / or management infrastructure and / or people such as extended power outages, security beaches, runaway data corruption, natural disasters, etc
• A major competitive disruption to the communications service offerings that cause you to use your OSS and other means to scramble to recover lost market position, This may include rapid response by the OSS to to deliver new offerings far faster than usual product development cycles
• A major competitive disruption to OSS, supporting technologies or managed networks that usurps and rapidly supersedes your current offering. It’s possible that a competitor finds a way to overcome one or more of the elephant in the room problems facing our industry today and changes the marketplace forever

Naturally you don’t want to be creating an action plan during the stress of any of these chaotic events. Just like professional sporting teams that build their playbooks far ahead of time and drill their team on the tactical response manoeuvres, we also need to plan and practice.

Using my Forward Response framework as a guide, I’d be happy to assist with you to develop your strategic contingency planning playbook.