“Without order nothing exists, but without chaos nothing evolves.” – Unknown
Everything in the world exists in balance. Order is necessary for day to day tasks to run smoothly. But chaos is required for innovations and change. Since every positive has a negative, the ability to know and understand chaos determines how secure your business really is.
Nothing in the world is 100% secure. Why? Everything in the world evolves, grows and becomes more complex. The pain points of growing are exactly the complexity portions of it. However, there is a remedy to lessen the complexity so that it does not result to too much chaos.
The remedy to chaos is to follow it and try to predict the unpredictable. This is used to “soften the blow” when it comes to handling risks that growth naturally creates. In business, things rarely go as planned. Thus, contingency planning exists. It is preparation to make sure that when something breaks down, you will know how to fix it immediately or avoid it completely.
How Is Contingency Planning Applied In Business?
Preventative maintenance is the best choice to avoid many headaches and loss of business operations. But how exactly does preventative maintenance or contingency planning work? From MindTools, here are steps for risk management:
- What are the minimum services and features does your business need to continue its operations and minimize losses? This is dependent on your type of business
- For each of those features, rate which ones create more risks that highly affects your business and prioritize in fixing those first
- Risk and contingency planning is a balancing act of over-preparing and preparing just enough so that you can recover from crisis as quickly as possible if they occur
In addition to contingency planning, there is also scenario planning, which is a type of strategic plan where you create alternate scenarios for possible events that can happen in the future. Like anything in life, for every Plan A, there must be a Plan B or even C to mitigate what you may have missed in Plan A. This helps lessen uncertainties and allow businesses to predict the unpredictable. Scenario planning allows businesses to adapt to changes as well as benefit from creating those changes themselves.
By predicting the possible cause and affect combinations of every decision made, it will be easier to come up with solutions for problems before they even occur. The starting point is as simple as asking “what if” questions. Scenario planning is like an art form that shines if we blend the known with the unknown factors.
The better you get at visualizing the negative scenarios and current weaknesses, the stronger your business becomes when you are able to find solutions before anyone else does. Final result is a more flexible long term plan that allows businesses to become more creative and resourceful.
How Are Contingency and Scenario Planning Used in Web Development?
The security and maintenance of your website is only as good as the amount of time spent on planning for the inevitable changes before implementation. There are many ways to go about adding contents on a website or how something functions. The simpler the common tasks are done, the less difficult it is to maintain it.
However, there are some features that are challenging to develop because it involves layers and layers of planning and creating alternate scenarios. For instance, if we have a website where multiple users can create their own contents, what are their different actions? The actions are usually determined by their role.
When the user logs in to a website, what kinds of tasks is the user shown? What if the user clicks on the first call to action link or button? What happens if the user doesn’t click on the first, but the second? When the user fills out a form, what happens once it is submitted?
If we think of it as a normal contact form, everyone knows that an email is sent. But what if this form is aggregating surveys and information to update an external API service, which then outputs a JSON file that is parsed to produce a chart-like interface back to the website using a Javascript library like d3js.org, Google charts, or Chart.js?
It is a web developer’s profession to make this aggregation as seamless as possible for the end-users because end-users usually do not want to deal with logical code. All end-users want is to see the graphs coming from the data they entered in the form fields as soon as possible. This complex feature is made simple by a web developer. But why do some people underestimate simplicity?
Simplicity is an art form that only comes when you have done all of the necessary planning from the start. Not only planning what should be done to fix problems, but also planning solutions for new problems and new scenarios to adapt to new changes.
Maximum security is possible when efficiency, simplicity and maintenance all work together to continually improve processes. In that sense, do you have a Plan B?
