Project Office

Having a disaster recovery plan is commonplace for most companies. It’s an essential tool for dealing with emergency situations, whether they’re caused by a natural disaster, act of terrorism, or infrastructure failure. When that disaster hits, everyone from the executives to the employees need to know how to react. But there’s a fundamental problem with these companywide plans: They are often focused solely on the first step to recovery, getting the day-to-day business running smoothly again. They can fail to address the equally important step of preserving mission critical projects.

With business increasingly turning to global resourcing, project managers need to be ready as ever for a crisis. Things may be running smoothly on your end but an unexpected event across the world can quickly change everything. And when those essential decisions need to be made, general company-wide business continuity strategies cannot simply be applied to individual projects. Forward thinking companies need to have a plan in place on both a company-wide and project level.

So what can be done to save projects from crisis?  Well you certainly can’t prepare for every possible problem but there are some proactive steps that can help limit the damage. Here are a few of those tips to applying crisis management at a project level:

1. Get Employees Back On Track

Typical recovery plans can get your business up and running again but that doesn’t mean your project teams are ready to work as normal. Depending on the level of crisis, it’s very possible you need to evaluate the mental state of not only the project managers, but every member of the project team. And the best tool for evaluating those employees is simple communication. Be sure to individually speak with each individual. Make sure they are aware of what happened, why it happened, what you are doing to fix it and how they fit into that recovery plan. This will help turn anxiety into purpose and get everyone pushing in the same direction.

2. Demonstrate Fiscal Control

When a disaster hits your company, part of the overall company response may be cutting unnecessary projects. That’s when project managers need to prove they can fight through the problems, making the retention of their project a worthwhile expense. And one of the first items management will evaluate is the financial status of your project. Budgeting properly throughout the project gives you leverage in case of crisis. Demonstrating that you are fiscally responsible also gives executives confidence you are capable of getting the project back on track with minimal additional costs.

3. Deploy Your Internal Champion

For every project, there is an internal champion, the senior employee most vocally supportive of it from the beginning. Always know who that person is and utilize them. The internal champion will be more important than ever during a crisis. More often this may be the project sponsor but it can also be a manager who had the original idea or an influential, well-connected employee who has been involved from the start. Whoever he or she is, re-engage that person and ask for their help in communicating the importance of the project to executive management. They’ll be the one person willing to go the extra mile and you’ll need their help in order to navigate through this tough time.

4. Stay Organized

This may be an obvious one but you would be surprised how many companies are completely lost after a crisis based solely on the fact that the project was not well organized beforehand. This responsibility, of course, lies mainly with project manager. Making sure every aspect of the project is documented and filed properly is especially important because backtracking may be necessary post-crisis. Organizational skills may sound like Project Management 101 but the fact is you simply cannot survive a crisis without them.

5. Use the Cloud

Part of proper project organization is making sure you work is backed up. With the introduction of cloud technology, project managers have the ability to save and store everything they do in a safe, crisis-free, database. Just saving e-mails isn’t good enough and social media is far too public for internal communication. Data storage technology is improving and growing cheaper every day, so there is simply no reason to not backup your project documents. Those without their own internal storage databases can utilize external sites like Dropbox to store information. In general, use the cloud and you’ll never fear a lost file again.

Overall, crisis management is a tough subject to pin down. Every company is different and every crisis is different. But when those rough times hit, company executives must not forget about the projects and programs that will help their businesses grow and remain competitive. With proper preparation and a solid project-level strategy, your projects can rebound as quickly as the rest of the firm. And in the long run, saving those projects may very well be saving the company.

Mark Vaughn, a partner at Navint, has 18 years of business and technology consulting experience in a variety of industries, including financial services, media and entertainment, manufacturing and distribution, consumer goods and educational services. He specializes in business process re-engineering, technology strategy and planning, custom software development, as well as front- and back-office enterprise application implementations. With his program management and project leadership capabilities, Mark has also developed finance transformation and offshore integration solutions. Prior to Navint, Mark was the Financial Services practice director for Nextera Technology Solutions Group. He also worked as a project manager for The Thompson Group and, early in his career, provided engineering services to automotive, transportation technology and consumer goods companies.

Link to original article: http://www.projectsatwork.com/content/Articles/272505.cfm