1) Contingency plans, business continuity plans and disaster recovery planning are simply the alternative plan which will be used if possible foreseen risk event becomes a reality. Nevertheless, all three conforms to a similar process with set if activities which include: analysis, solution design, implementation, testing and acceptance and maintenance. In discussing the activities involved, ideas will be built on an emergency case of loss of power supply in a building. In the first stage, risks and/or threats and how these will impact the business are analysed. Savage (2002) mentions that at this stage, it would be necessary to assess the potential impact of that specific event so that to understand the extent of potential loss. For our case, the responsible personnel should act in order to determine the reasons for failure, the warning indicators and the areas affected as well as the recovery time objective (RTO). In the solution design stage, what is needed is to distinguish which among the recovery solutions would be most cost effective. It is the personnel’s duty to check for backup resources via checking and monitoring backup resources of priority and recovering backup resources whenever necessary in priority order (i.e. heating and cooling systems for control, rechargeable torch, etc.). The execution of the design aspects is the implementation stage wherein the personnel could take the initial response of determining the estimated duration of failure and compare it with RTO. Then, implement monitoring tasks including turning off of computer terminals, shutting down instruments and resetting alarms. The next step would be the experimentation in order to satisfy the recovery requirements. The personnel are responsible to determine whether initiating tasks are necessary before applying sustaining tasks in case of power supply loss. Samples of initiating task are transferring electrical instruments to safer place and transferring business operation to another area while examples of sustaining task liaising with other contingency plans which will be directly or indirectly affected by the failure like the telecommunications. It is in this stage that the responsible personnel could conduct the necessary recovery. If the failure ends, the recovery tasks would include proceeding as per telecommunications failure contingency plan, for instance, and turning on equipments and lights and re-rostering of staff back to the area when the situation gets okay. In the maintenance stage, maintenance tasks will be incorporated in a daily basis until the situation gets completely recovered. Updates will be critical. The personnel must review and update when there are additional or changed conditions or instances when work procedures are reviewed. Plans must be disseminated to authorities having jurisdiction as well. Importantly, the personnel shall document all of these with a business interruption event log.
2) For me, a contingency plan is like a ‘thinking out of the box’ approach which could provide profound benefits to the hotel chain. As the Informations Systems Director, it is of my best belief that a contingency plan will benefit this hotel chain in four key areas. First is the assurance of effective and quality performance of the IT systems. Second is the assurance of employee buy in and commitment. Third would be the inexistence of sound management strategies. And fourth, the long-term business growth of the hotels be it in Hong Kong or Mainland China. According to Mitome, Speer and Swift (2001), a contingency plan helps hotels to get into a better position to cope with unexpected developments. It is necessary to note that our hotel chain relies heavily on IT operations. IT is one industry that is advantaged by innovation. In order that the hotels will cope with the technological changes, integrating IT innovations to the operation is needed. Although expensive, it is not an excuse for the hotel to avail both softwares and hardwares as it can boost the information-building competence of the chain. The hotel chain could also benefit by means of reducing indecisions, delays and uncertainties when something unusual happens. Through a contingency plan, the hotels could think and prepare ahead for following an emergency or disasters, allowing the hotel management to remain in forward direction. When it comes to IT, petty problems could be addressed such as locating areas and choosing alternative hotel activities through stand-alone hotel kiosks. Moreover, a hotel with a contingency plan could better respond to unplanned situations rationally. A contingency plans follows a specific route wherein various authorities and personnel will be involved. Within each major activity are set of sub-activities that the hotel could adapt. In addition, a contingency plan forces these authorities and personnel to deal with and think of possible solutions and alternatives instead of the available or most likely outcome. The contingency planning process could also help the hotel management to brainstorm and come up with the most effective and efficient ideas and outcomes thereby preparing for the worst that could happen. As such, I believed that a contingency plan will help the hotel chain to examine every critical aspects of operation and think both reactively and proactively. Further, I am also one with Chow (2000) that it is important for the hotel industry to have contingency plans as one of the success factors of the business operation but with alliances on other success factors such as top management commitment, employee commitment, risk assessment and management capability and adequate financial support.
3) There are two alternative approaches: work breakdown structure and product breakdown structure. The work breakdown structure (WBS) is used to capture all the works of a particular project. This is a results-oriented family tree presenting the activities to conduct or perform. WBS is represented by a hierarchical figure to organised complex and large projects. Through such process, projects are comprehended based on breaking down its down progressively into a collection of sub-activities which is also known as work packages including a number of tasks. WBS therefore provides the framework for organisation and management of the project wherein tasks are delegated by a number of people in a prescribed period of time. WBS, further, is accomplished during the planning stages of the project as it assists defining the scope and estimating costs. As WBS guides the project throughout, it will be utilised as a necessary tool in tracking and monitoring work packages. One of the advantages of WBS is its manageability as it is constructed from top to bottom and in detailed components. Because WBS is not initially very particular with dates like the Gantt chart, the focus will be solely on the content of the projects hence creating the intuitive and understandable overview of the project content. WBS also serves as a content controlling tool because of the system in determining which work packages are finished or not. Finally, WBS determines the progress of the project. Also a hierarchical tree structure, product breakdown structure (PBS), on the other hand, arranges the components of a specific project through a whole-part relationship and helps in identifying what it is to be delivered by the project. PBS thereby assists in building a WBS. In simpler terms, PBS is a term given to a particular application of WBS. The rationale behind this is that in larger, complex projects the basis of WBS is product. This is taken from the perspective of the project scope definition whereas low-level WBS depends strongly on activities or tasks. One advantage of the PBS, however, is that it has the ability to surface critical assumptions and constraints to which the WBS cannot. For a high level WBS to be products-based, there are several considerations. If the program or project is relatively large in value and long in duration, involves several geographical regions and is complex with multiple components. In addition, if the project will be completed by varying people skills and will benefit from subdividing into time-phased elements then a high-level product-based WBS should be also adapted.
4) Since every project is a portfolio of several activities, it is necessary that project managers have knowledge on various techniques for identifying activities. Aside from the WBS, other tools are schedule development by means of critical path method, program evaluation and review technique, graphical evaluation and review technique and duration and compression techniques such as crashing and fast tracking. Critical path method or CPM is a part of a group of techniques known as Network Models. CPM is subdivided into six elements consisting of the creation of WBS and network diagram of the project, the computation of activity times and activity total float as well as the project duration and critical path, the creation of activity schedule table and a Gantt chart schedule. The importance of CPM lies in the fact that it formally identifies activities which must be completed on time for the whole project to be completed on time. Program evaluation and review technique or simply PERT is a variation of CPM only it focuses more on cost rather than on time. Both are used to plan activities of the project though PERT is more event-oriented hence PERT is probabilistic while CPM is deterministic. Graphical evaluation and review technique (GERT), in comparison, is a stochastic network analysis technique, allowing the probabilistic treatment of network logic and activity duration estimation. Duration compression is a technique of shortening the completion of a project without the need to reduce its scope, only this technique is costly and requires extensive manpower. Nevertheless, there is a logical relationship among the activities. Such relationship is primarily based on the dependency of two project activities or the dependency between a project activity and milestone. It is therefore important to conform to an effective schedule development scheme as this will determine the parallel activities which could be grouped depending on which technique to be used and determine the earliest/latest and finish times for each activity. All of these techniques represents the logical relationships among activities which comprise of finish to start, start to start, start to finish and finish to finish. As such, these techniques help project managers to sequence and schedule these project activities. Further, the estimated completion times and sequences to which they are performed are presented. In estimating the duration of the project, there are particular basis: similar activities of known duration, historical data, experts advice, Delphi method, Three Point Method and Wide Band Delphi method. The project manager identifies the critical activities of the project based on the project network diagram and estimates the project duration and controls the schedule of the project to complete it within the desired time.
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