Building a Disaster Recovery Plan

Building a Disaster Recovery Plan

Choosing a commercial construction firm is a complex yet expensive endeavor. Hence, the contractor you choose must build a disaster recovery plan if a disaster occurs or strikes during active construction.

The DRP is essential to help mitigate damage to your existing built environment and enables the contractor to resume progress without a massive impact on the schedule. So, having a disaster recovery plan is essential if you have commercial construction in a location prone to disasters.

It needs to be addressed by project managers in collaboration with you or other stakeholders. But how should a disaster recovery plan be for a commercial project?

An Effective DRP is a Two-Fold Philosophy

With any disaster recovery plan, you need underlying specifics in place, making it a two-fold philosophy approach:

First Comes Safety

The first thing any commercial construction firm needs to prioritize is safety. Work should not resume before all the safety conditions are met. These safety measures can involve implementing unforeseen dangers like the site containing hazardous material flooded.

Or it can be waiting for a storm to pass with weather conditions confirming that it can lead to damaging structural elements before work is permitted to resume. Still, no matter the case, human life must always be preserved and at the top of the list of priorities. Visit https://astra-management.ca/ to learn more.

Achieving this goal is essential and remains the overall concern with any disaster recovery plan.

The Importance of Interconnectivity

Secondly, project teams need to always be conceptual with their projects seeing them as a web of relationships. For example, with your commercial construction, it is not only about completing the project, as many people are involved. You have:

  • Stakeholders
  • Engineers
  • Other professionals
  • Laborers and all the families

When disaster strikes, all parties are affected the same when calamity happens. All these relationships impact how construction will resume in different ways from the storm extent to the project phase.

For example, when you have a vast labor pool, many will not be able to travel to the construction site as they cannot find suitable transportation to accommodation. While a design team can work remotely, it helps to identify alternative suppliers before a project starts to keep it on schedule if another supplier is part of the disaster.

Hence, this is important as when disaster strikes in your close-out phase; it can impact the end users’ ability to finalize that project. So, all project relationships must be examined on how a disaster will impact the project moving forward with different disaster-borne problems.

With an Understanding of Interconnectivity, You Can Draft a DRP

Once the project team understands the interconnectivity of all present, they can draft a DRP prioritizing all of the above. Furthermore, some formal elements can strengthen the disaster recovery plan for the active job site.

  • Project teams must evaluate the best and most relevant insurance provisions from the outset of planning. A comprehensive insurance policy prevents project costs from becoming high during a disaster.
  • The drafted contract must include details on how a client is protected and how project managers respond if a force majeure or act of God should occur. In addition, the terms used must take into account not only the impact of the disaster but other lingering effects impacting the whole web comprising a project for weeks to months.

Here it helps to contact a legal team to help clarify the cost to schedule provisions agreed upon with the client and the project team and stipulated in the contract documents. Furthermore, a temporary office setup needs to be implemented in a safe location to use in disaster cases.

On the other hand, in a disaster, accurate written and photographic documentation of the event must stipulate the cost recovery done through the project insurance policy. Hence, the documentation must include the coverage of the nature of the disaster event to provide an accurate estimation of the money and time lost to material damage or the work on site.

If work cannot resume, a plan of action needs to be communicated to all participants. The document process must start as soon as everything is safe, with added steps taken concerning the nature and extent of the disaster. 

Time to Call In Experts

Building a disaster recovery plan means hiring a disaster recovery entity to help develop such a plan. If your disaster exceeds the scope of your project, then a dedicated professional can provide relief for your project.

A commercial construction team with a disaster professional has experience dealing with such disasters. When you adhere to the above two-step philosophy plan, merge the elements with your project.

The project team can maintain their project in the case of any unforeseen disaster. Still, if the project faces difficulties way beyond the project team’s expectations, the best advice is to bring a disaster recovery specialist in to help support the project recovery.

Whether it is a natural disaster or someone getting hurt on site, you always need to protect your project from financial and physical risk.

Originally posted 2022-10-25 14:08:00.