As good Project Managers, we’re always being asked to predict and plan for risks. All of you reading this will have been inundated with emails on your contingency planning for the Corona Virus. One issue we’ve seen is that the focus seems mainly be to make plans for what happens in the case of an outbreak in an office location.
We feel that instead it’s time we got out ahead of these risks. With this in mind, we’re looking at each team we have in a location and reviewing what would happen if there was an outbreak. Inevitably, we would have to quickly execute a plan to have the full staff move to work from home. This could be very disruptive to day to day activities and have unpredictable results. While half-day dummy runs will help, the impact of teams working for a number of weeks is still difficult to predict.
So, to get ahead of the risk we have decided that we would ask a portion of the staff in each department to move to working remotely immediately. With this approach, were there to be an outbreak in the office those already working remotely would not be affected by that outbreak. This would allow us continuity of service while contributing to the community effort to slow down the spread of the virus.
Author: Colum Horgan, CTO, Aspira
