Secure Planning Assignment - Free Sample & Example

Question: Due to the changing environment and external triggers, contingency planning is necessary. What qualities make a future issue a trigger? Consider you are on the strategic planning team for a soft drink company. Here is your companys future trigger: merger of our two major competitors next year. Formulate the three-part trigger/contingency pair. Discuss the three guidelines that good contingency plans should follow. Answer: The current business environment is driven by uncertainties in the market. Therefore, it is important that the organizations should have the contingency plan in place. The contingency plan of organizations should focus on the internal as well as the external factors. The internal factor arises or exists within the company and the organization can make efforts to have effective contingency planning in place for the internal factors. However, it is always difficult to formulate the contingency plan for the external factors. The external factors would include the market and industry factors like competitors performance, economic conditions, etc. Therefore, it would be correct to say that it is the combination of the internal and the external factors that make a future issue a trigger. The three part trigger/ contingency pair for the scenario of merger between two soft drinks companies can be discussed as: Trigger 1: Valuation of the company Before any merger and acquisition, it is important that the third party should do valuation of the company. The valuation from the third party would help the organizations to get a true value of their firms (Mahmoodi, 2013). Trigger 2: Synergy between the organizations It is important that the firms should have high synergy before they take the path of merger. In any merger or acquisition, it is important that both the parties should have a common and shared vision. The synergy between two organizations would be dependent on the leaders and managers. It is important that the leaders should create a platform where employees can accept other employees. Trigger 3: Security risks and other issues There could be lot of security issues and challenges involved in any merger. The organization and leaders must have the plan to overcome the security threats and challenges (Zimmerman, 2013). The security aspects should include the Information Technology related security risks, physical risks, infrastructure risks, etc. The three guidelines that good contingency plans should follow can be discussed as: Flexible organization structure: The organizations want to have a lean culture to manage the unseen difficulties. Lean has become a buzzword in contemporary times. All the corporate, business leaders, strategists and consulting organizations are discussing and writing papers on why implementation of lean principles has become important part in the journey of any organization. Phased and gradual approach: It is important that the contingency plan for the organization should have a phased implementation approach. It should be easy to roll out the contingency plan in the organization. Stakeholders awareness: In an organizational setting, the stakeholders should be aware of the various aspects of contingency plan. In case of any contingency, the key stakeholders like director, project managers, etc. should be in a state where they can roll out the contingency plan in the organization. References Murillo-Snchez, C. E., Zimmerman, R. D., Anderson, C. L., Thomas, R. J. (2013). Secure planning and operations of systems with stochastic sources, energy storage, and active demand.IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid,4(4), 2220-2229. Ruiz-Torres, A. J., Mahmoodi, F., Zeng, A. Z. (2013). Supplier selection model with contingency planning for supplier failures.Computers Industrial Engineering,66(2), 374-382.