Does the Contingency Plan Actually Reduce Project Risk?
This may seem like an odd thing to ask. After all surely every contingency plan reduces risk? Well no. You would be surprised how many project manager’s, in their desire to actually have a contingency plan, end up devising ever more “creative” solutions which end up being actually riskier than the original risk it was mean’t to mitigate against. Remember there is absolutely no point in having a contingency for a risk, if quite frankly it would be complete madness to implement it. So for example, if you were dependent on a car to take you to a critical meeting, the date and time of which couldn’t be changed, a contingency could be to use another mode of transport, say public transport. Well depending on where you are living, this may not be a less risky solution because public transport might be completely unreliable. Therefore a less risky contingency would be to travel the night before and stay over in a hotel. It might be a more expensive option, but depending on how big an impact th
