Operations – Crisis Management Plan

At the onset of any crisis, the utmost focus is essential to ensure that the crisis management plan and all necessary crisis management strategies are executed properly. Having a framework by which to execute your crisis management plan will help your team skip thinking about what to do next and focus on just getting things done. Our Crisis Management Template will help you achieve just that.

This board template is based on the five Crisis Management Phases of Prevention, Response, Resumption, Recovery, and Restoration (PR4). The idea is that for each type of crisis, there can be a combination of actions and strategies that target to prevent the worsening impact of the crisis, respond to the immediate concerns of the crisis, resume critical operations, recover less critical operations, and fully restore operations.

• Prevention – Proactive planning on measures that can be executed to lessen the risk of the crisis or lessen its business impact
• Response – Planning and execution of initial crisis response to address immediate concerns of stakeholders. This is designed to protect people, property, and business value.
• Resumption  – Planning and execution of measures to resume time-sensitive operations following the crisis
• Recovery – Planning and execution of measures to resume less time-sensitive operations following the crisis
• Restoration – Planning and execution of long-term measures that will lead to normal business operations

Making this Kanban board work will require that your organization has a crisis management or business continuity plan in place. This may mean that you already have specific response modules for each type of crisis that your company can face. Having a crisis management plan saves the team from guessing and planning on the fly during the event of the crisis.

Guided by a crisis management plan, this Kanban board template will help you execute your plan with efficiency and focus.

When a crisis strikes, the identification of the scenarios that can take place is crucial. Once you’ve identified the crisis scenarios, you can then create tasks to address the crisis as cards on your board. The tasks will most likely come from your crisis management or business continuity plan, or from agreements within the crisis management team on what needs to be done.

This template also has preset labels to indicate the type of crisis that you are addressing. These labels are configurable and can be easily edited by your team.

The board has three main process steps:

How to Use the Crisis Management Template

1. Start your Free Trial, then build a new board from the Crisis Management Template.
2. First is to Detect and Assess the crisis scenario that you are addressing. This step is important as it is in this stage that you will gather facts about the scenario and determine the strategy or action that needs to be applied to address the crisis.
3. Next is to Execute the Strategies. Here, we used a combination of vertical and horizontal containers to create specific swim lanes per crisis management phase you are trying to address. Having specific containers to house your tasks per phase will help you easily determine what area in the crisis management plan each task is designed to address. This will also come in handy when you have specific teams handling each phase in the crisis management plan.
4. Executing strategies is only a two-step approach where after the application of the task, the team needs to monitor if the resolution has fully addressed the crisis at hand.
5. After tasks are implemented, transfer them to the Done column to free your In Progress containers from clutter and allow your team to focus on pending tasks.

For a leader, having a crisis management plan in place will ensure that your organization is prepared to face crises head-on. This crisis management board template will definitely help your team handle crises effectively by zeroing in on what needs to get done.