Crisis Management Plan
This is a Crisis Management Plan for the Jovial International Company, an IT Company based in South Carolina.
A crisis management plan is a document that explains how a company plans on responding to a security crisis to reduce its impact on its operations. It explains how an organization will reduce the impact the crisis will bring to the company and its stakeholders. This plan can be broken down into three phases, which are the pre-crisis, crisis, and post-crisis phases. The pre-crisis phase is the prevention phase, and it involves putting measures that could reduce the risks of crisis occurrences. Crisis preparedness involves creating a crisis management team that is qualified and competent to deal with a crisis. The team works together with other stakeholders to access potential risks that are bound to disrupt with business operations.
These risks may include cyber-attacks, physical damage to computers, etc. The team should assess the impact of the risks to the business. The next step includes identifying contingencies, which involve determining the actions that will effectively correct the crisis. A detailed plan that includes the budgeting, response activities, tasks and responsibilities of the response team, and communication strategies is developed. All members of the company are then familiarized with the plan to keep them prepared. The crisis management plan and the team should be tested effectively to ensure that they are effective (Institute for Public Relations, 2007). A plan can be tested through walkthrough testing, simulation testing, and checklist testing, or parallel testing (Watters et al., 2013).
The crisis response refers to what the organization officials will do and say during the crisis. It includes the initial response plan and repairing reputation plan. The initial response involves the procedures that will be used in responding to the crisis. The instructions should be quick, accurate, and reliable (Watters et al., 2013). It also explains how the organization will communicate with the public to explain the occurrence of the crisis, how it may affect them, and what the company is doing towards solving the issue. Also, the crisis response will involve the reputation repair strategies, which involves repairing the reputation damage that the crisis causes to the company. The final stage, the post-crisis phase, involves returning back to operation. It involves recovery processes and counteractive strategies. It also involves improving its infrastructure’s resilience and the crisis management plan. In this phase, the organization should share relevant information with the stakeholders involved. The stakeholders should be updated on the progress of the salvage process, such as the corrective measures, investigations, compensations, etc. Finally, the organization should integrate the lessons learned during the crisis to the response plan for future caution (Institute for Public Relations, 2007).
References
Institute for Public Relations. (2007). Crisis management and communications. Retrieved from https://instituteforpr.org/crisis-management-and-communications/
Watters, J., & Safari, an O’Reilly Media Company. (2013). Disaster Recovery, Crisis Response, and Business Continuity: A Management Desk Reference.