Crisis Management Plan

Part I – The Crisis Management Plan

The project helps you “put it all together” and requires that you prepare a complete crisis management plan. This module’s assignment will draw heavily from the assignments for Modules 3-6 and should represent a seamless, cohesive whole.

Module 4’s templates and the format in the textbook’s appendix do not, by themselves, tell you everything you need to know about the sections of a good crisis management plan.

We recommend you include the following sections:
• Definition of a crisis
• Specific crises your organization might face
• Purpose of a crisis management team (CMT)
• Activating the CMT
• CMT members and contact information
• CMT roles and responsibilities
• Command Center locations
• General crisis response plan
• Crisis-specific response plans
• General crisis communication strategy
• Crisis-specific communication plans and templates

Think carefully about the order of the sections of the Plan. Some students put the crisis communication section before any response section; this is backward, and it highlights a misunderstanding about the broader meaning of “crisis response,” which is about more than just communication … because crises and their management are about more than reputational risk!

In general, please use everything you created for the crisis response plan and crisis communication plan project assignments. Be sure to incorporate and address the feedback given to you during the weekly module project assignments. However, there is no need to automatically include all project assignments unless the material truly adds to the overall crisis management plan. Indeed, throwing in stuff just to make the Plan longer actually hurts it because that extra irrelevant stuff is distracting and not user-friendly.

In the textbook’s appendix, a recommendation is given to use two worksheets – a SWOT analysis and a PEST analysis – to help you create a list of potential crises your plan should address. Of course, you’ve already conducted both a SWOT analysis and a PEST analysis when you did Module 2’s and 3’s project assignments. Some students are tempted to include their SWOT and PEST analyses. That’s distracting because those analyses are not actually specific response plans. Rather, they are useful in identifying or predicting possible crises.

Crisis-specific response plans contain concrete and specific response actions. With respect to concrete response actions, some students include crisis-specific instructions to employees. Instructions to individual employees are not the same as crisis-specific response plans, which have to do with the organization’s overall response as an entity.

PS: This assignment include a presentation part that I need to complete by Sunday, the sooner you are done, I will be able to work on the presentation and video.