5.1 What is a Plan B?

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Let us say we are scheduling a wedding reception for which being outdoors is a requirement. Lost souls may ignore the possibility of inclement weather, but we take our wedding planning seriously around here. Therefore, from a Plan B perspective, we are faced with three logical choices:

Have an alternate date you can switch to if rain looms in the forecast.
Schedule the event at a site where you could move inside if necessary.
Put up a tent and consider the risk to be mitigated.

Exhibit 1 lists each course of action as a potential Plan B. Also listed are the merits and potential downsides to each option

Exhibit 1: Wedding Reception Plan B Options

Plan B Option	Upside	Downside
Have an alternate day if rain is forecast for the primary date.	Should allow total freedom of site selection.	Scheduling nightmare for guests, caterers, and the band.
Pick a site where you can move indoors if it rains.	Chances are you can stay outside, but you are covered if it pours.	May limit choices based on accommodations and cache.
Splurge for a nice big, white tent.	Should not impact site selection.	Tents are costly, can leak, and feel closed in.

The up- and downsides of each Plan B option are pretty easy to deduce and play out. The two swing issues are site selection and cost. If cost is no problem, putting up a tent makes the most sense, because you should be able to hold to your schedule regardless of precipitation, and site selection is not impacted. Well, it should not be. Honesty compels me to report that friends of ours had to take down a tree in their back yard to make room for a tent for their daughter's reception. They, however, fall into the "cost is not a problem" demographic, which is not the case for all families and information technology (IT) projects.

Our three Plan B options differ in whether they are contingent or not. The first two are, whereas the third option, erecting a tent, is not. By choosing this last option and implementing it as part of our regular plan, we preemptively eliminate rain as a risk. In contrast, the first two options are contingent. With these strategies, we decide to deal with rain if it becomes:

Highly probable (option one)
A reality (option two)

Exhibit 2 allows you to see that options one and two have a trigger underlined in the "Plan B option" column and a "go/no go" decision point underlined in the "planning issues" column. These triggers and go/no go decision points are key components of contingency planning. It is important to recognize that the choice you and your team make on Plan B can affect your schedule procedurally. By this, I mean that different approaches to mitigating a risk can create additional and diverse tasks for the team. Let us see if Exhibit 2 clarifies that point by using the wedding reception weather risk once again.

Exhibit 2: Variations by Plan B on Triggers, Schedules, and Work Effort

Plan B	Trigger Test	Lead Time for Trigger	Implications
Have an alternate day for wedding.	Based on forecast for primary date.	No more or less than seven days prior to wedding.	Scheduling nightmare. Must double book venue, travel arrangements, band, and caterer.
Pick a spot that is okay indoors or out.	Based on same day forecast and observations.	Two to four hours prior to reception.	Everything has to get moved indoors (band, bar, tables, and chairs) if it rains.
Rent a tent.	None required.	None required.	Hope no one slips and falls when running to the powder room if it rains.

So far as I am concerned, Plan Bs are normal components of your regular project plan. Whether it is "built-in," as we did by renting a tent, or contingent on some trigger, will be determined by many factors to be discussed in this chapter. In either case, integrate the "built-in" Plan B and embed go/no go trigger dates into your project calendar as well, with back-up plans ready to go should that trigger get pulled.

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