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You first 100 Days - The Crisis Management Plan
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After financial close, everyone wants to get moving. Mobilisation plans. Design programmes. Construction schedules. Reporting templates. Hundreds of meetings. And a few parties. But there is one document I would want agreed before almost anything else. The Crisis Management Plan. And I mean agreed. Not another document that’s written for the sake of it and forgotten in a drawer for the duration of the project and that only sees the light in the annual quality audit… No. But something like a short, practical plan that everyone understands, everyone has approved and everyone can activate. Because the crisis does not wait until the next round of the review procedures is finished. It can arrive the day after financial close. A fatality. A corruption allegation. A cyberattack. Confidential documents sent to the wrong person. A serious environmental incident. A journalist calling about something nobody in the project team knew had happened. At that moment, you do not want the client, SPV, contractor, investors and communications teams improvising independently. You do not want five versions of the facts. You do not want people arguing about who must notify the regulator. And you definitely do not want someone making an admission with contractual, legal or insurance consequences because nobody told them who was authorised to speak. There are real examples of what happens when this preparation is missing. Plenty. Unfortunately. And this is something that still everyone forgets. They put it into the documentation “to be developed”… and to the next thing. Look at the Grenfell Tower fire. Perfectly documented. The official inquiry found that the council’s contingency arrangements did not include an up-to-date communications plan. Never finished completely. Never adequately rehearsed. When the emergency arrived, the existing activation protocol was not properly followed. And the rest is history. The lesson is uncomfortable but simple: Having a crisis plan to be developed is not good enough. The parties must agree it. The people involved must know their roles. The contact details must work. The decision-making authority must be clear. And the plan must be tested while everyone is calm. Period. If only, this was compulsory for financial close… Look. A document nobody can use under pressure is not a crisis plan. It is paperwork. Lost in the drawer… This is one of the 18 critical things I believe every major infrastructure project should complete during its first 100 days after financial close. You are not preparing for the crisis you expect. You are preparing for the one nobody saw coming. Use this information at your own risk. If interested in your own plan… click below. ONLY 4 SEATS - First arrived, first served.
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Vicente Valencia
Weekly insights on how to perform when it matters | High-stakes decisions. Real situations. No BS. | 👇JOIN +2k readers 👇
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