When an incident threatens an organization, its integrity, and viability, that organization will turn to a strategic plan to define how the incident should be addressed. That strategic plan is more commonly referred to as a crisis management plan (CMP).
So, read on to learn how Noggin’s new functionality helps streamline crisis management planning.
A crisis management plan lays out the framework for managing the strategic issues resulting from an incident. That’s why the plan itself is developed by a crisis or resilience manager in collaboration with other senior managers then approved by the most senior leadership.
Challenges with crisis management planning
Further heightening the strategic importance of the crisis management plan has been the precipitous increase in critical incidents over the last few years – from extreme weather to cyber-attacks to third-party failures.
In fact, three out of every four organizations activated their crisis management team last year, according to the BCI Crisis Management Report 2024. More than half experienced anywhere between one and five crises during the year. And 19% of organizations faced a staggering six or more incidents. These figures lead one to ask, how effective were the underlying crisis management plans in ensuring a swift and effective response and restoring operations as quickly as possible?
Unfortunately, the data here points to stark issues with the implementation, distribution, and awareness of crisis management plans, challenges that then bled into the incident response.
What’s going on, exactly? The data suggests that once crisis management plans have been developed, too many stakeholders within the organization aren’t being brought into the loop. Case in point: 30% of surveyed organizations acknowledged that their wider staff were unaware of the crisis management plan. Those same organizations recognized that the lack of awareness either already has or could eventually lead to confusion in a crisis scenario.
That’s not all. Thirty percent of organizations also agreed with the statement that their crisis management plans were not being shared across the organization.
Indeed, the overall lack of plan awareness goes against the very guiding principles of effective crisis management planning. The crisis management plan itself, according to BCI’s Good Practice Guidelines, is supposed to set overarching objectives that are then communicated throughout the organization when responding to a crisis. It’s plan communication and awareness that are so crucial to ensuring that the crisis management plan helps to ensure safety and wellbeing as well as meets an organization’s requirements, be they legal, regulatory, or other.
Digitizing the end-to-end crisis management planning process for best-practice plans
Given the challenges, how do organizations ensure that their crisis management plans not only get developed but also distributed according to best practice? That’s where digital technology comes in. And so, in this article, we discuss how Noggin’s latest crisis and incident management software enhancement helps organizations build, maintain, distribute, and make easy improvements to their crisis plan documents.
Here’s how it works.
A perennial issue in the crisis management planning process is that plans are often created in Microsoft Word and then either printed out to remain in a binder or stored electronically in a document management system like Microsoft SharePoint. Neither tact provides much flexibility or accessibility during an actual incident.
What Noggin has done, instead, is digitize the end-to-end crisis management planning process, from ideation all the way to update, to allow for enhanced collaboration, streamlined approvals, easier maintenance, and quicker activation during a crisis. The enhancement that Noggin’s just brought to market consists of a basic data structure including:
- Dedicated Module for the crisis management plan and approval data
- Powerful workflows for notifications and approvals
- Forms covering a range of functionality – from plan creation to approval
- Adjustments to the improvement activity form to capture feedback against a crisis management plan
So, what does this all mean in practice? Well, managers can now use Noggin throughout all stages of the crisis management planning process from pending plans to plans in development to fully approved plans.
When creating plans in the system, users will be prompted to input key plan details, including plan name, plan approver, and other document composition details like the distribution list – being able to manage contact lists digitally alone provides incredible value, as 44.5% of organizations are still using call trees as part of their organization’s crisis response.
Meanwhile, robust approval workflows sit behind this functionality, so that managers can approve changes to the plan and notifications will flow accordingly. Managers can also send back notes on what still needs to be improved to ensure the plan accords with organizational needs and best-practice standards.
Besides being able to replace their Word-created plans, organizations also get a means to action their improvement activities at a planning level, as well. And that’s because Noggin can now track improvement actions, which will now be flagged against the crisis management plan, so that the plan owner will be notified.
Finally, the crisis management plan is one of the most strategic documents an organization will create. However, in an age of escalating crises, organizations can no longer afford to tolerate plans that don’t integrate well into the crisis and incident lifecycle.
Thanks to Noggin’s latest crisis and incident management software enhancement, they won’t have to. The new Module digitizes the end-to-end planning process, helping organizations build and maintain plan documents as well as action improvement activities against them, in a way that fosters the collaboration and coordination needed to streamline the planning process.
Don’t take our word for it, though. See Noggin in action for yourself in a software demonstration.
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