I’ve been reading a lot recently and listening to others talking about the detailed planning that needs to take place to allow business and services to resume once the current restrictions begin to lift.

This has furnished me with a plentiful supply of good advice and practical actions that need to be taken to ensure the safety of employees and customers alike.

However, it got me thinking about the underlying assumptions that recovery plans are based on and how robust or fragile these assumptions might be.

I concluded that in developing our detailed plans, we need to be absolutely clear on what the key assumptions are that our plan is dependent on and make sure we test these thoroughly before we commit to the plan.

Some examples of this might include:

Plan, Do, Check, Act – never before has there been a time when these activities have been more important.

In particular the Check and Act activities are essential. Our horizons have shortened significantly and we need to be much more agile and allow time for monitoring hourly, daily, and weekly what’s going on in our business to check and test our assumptions and pivot plans based on new assumptions, refreshed data and changing behaviours.

Supply Chain Integrity – For example, If our plan is dependent on a plentiful and reliable supply of PPE, Hygiene Products, Cleaning Material etc, what happens if our supplies are compromised by what I’m sure will be an exponential growth in demand when business begin to re-open? Do we have to immediately shut down again? Risk assess supply chains, what is mission critical, people, supplies, services etc. How secure are they. Those that are critical, how do we ensure continuity of supply and what contingencies do we have if they are compromised. We don’t want to close down again so soon after re-opening.

Scalability – What happens to the actions within the plan when they are applied at scale. What may work for one venue but may be challenging when applied at a multi-site scale. For example, part of our plan may be heavily dependent on our people and our ability to have appropriate numbers of qualified staff available on particular days and times. Evidence from elsewhere suggests that as business restarts, levels of absenteeism have increased beyond the normal which may significantly impact on our ability to open, operate and sustain multiple venues simultaneously. If schools are not re-opening, who will look after children to allow parents to go to their work?

Finance – “Cash is King” and never before has this been truer for many businesses. Is our plan underpinned by a realistic and sustainable financial recovery plan? If revenues fall below the levels anticipated in our forecasts and costs are higher, we might be burning more cash than we can sustain so our plan is in danger of failing quickly.

Sequencing and Timing – the order in which our action plan needs to be implemented to be successful. An example of this might be that before we bring employees back to work, we need to re-induct them. New procedures and processes will need to be in place that differ from BAU. New risk assessments and safe systems of work will have to be developed. Do our planning assumptions reflect the need to have the appropriate resources in place to carry out this work, well in advance of employees restarting and are we allowing sufficient time to train and test before we consider re-opening to the public.

I think what each of these examples highlights is that in the urgency to get ready to restart, we need to think about the sustainability and flexibility of our plans. The best laid plans can and do fail on the smallest of details so lets be clear on what our assumptions are and ensure we go through a rigorous process to test them before we commit and find ourselves “down the flume” by which time, it’s too late!!