How will you deliver a project during the unseen pandemic situation with a contract already signed?

Lets define what is pandemic : Not planned natural or man caused event, which impacts humans wither financially, socially or healthwise. This may or may not result is shutting down the offices.

Recent examples of pandemic : Covid, Tsunami, Flooding of coastal areas

For our discussion, can I consider Covid which resulted in both - disruption of regular offices and health of the team members /co-workers. : Yes

For the project under discussion : Is this a new project or new phase of a previously completed project : You can take a call.

Can we assume that this is a software project we are talking about? Yes

If I think about it, a project has following stakefolders

1. Customer : Who is paying for the project
2. Business Team : Who got the project and is internal sponsor of the project
3. Program Manager : Person responsible for delivering the project
4. Team (Developers, QA, Designers, product managers) : Team that would actually deliver the project

When the pandemic hits, it generally results in the following

1. Normal life gets disrupted. 
2. Usual communication channel (F2F, Call) etc may take a hit
3. People may go through personal or financial loss

Here is how I will go about it

1. Team: Make sure that team is doing well and figure out what I or company can do to make sure that team members are taken care of for any kind of need. 

2. Impact : Identify the potential impact pandemic can have on the project. To understand the impact, I would also take help from SME within  the company (e.g. if this pandemic is going to get worse etc).

3. Discuss : Discuss the impact with the technology team and business team. Pandemic may also mean that team needs to move to different communication channels. We also need to understand if certain members of the team would not be able to contribute or their contribution could be less then 100%. This planning also need to factor in the potential disruption in the future.

4. Now once the impact assessment is done, we need to figure out that given the constraints, can we still deliver project on time or timelines are going to get impacted. I would assume that a pandemic situation would have an adverse impact on thr project timelines.

5. At this time, we need to include the client in our discussions. We need to understand from the client how time sensitive this project is. There is a good possibility that client is also going throigh similar problems because of pandemic. 

At this time, we need to make a plan along with client and business team. 

1. To take care of the team resources, I will reach out to HR and my leadership for additional bandwidth. Given the situation, I am unlikely to get support on this.
2. Work with the client to identify must and good to have features. We need to discuss the staggered release plan. 
3. Business team may also agree for some financial tradeoffs to make sure that client is happy. 
4. Work with the team to come with an execution plan. We will also need couple of backup plans as pandemic may have an adverse effect as it progresses. 
5. Pandemic may also mean that some of the deliverables are not possible : e.g. In-person interviews or site visits. Need to figure out what else we need to do.

Overall - pandemic planning will start with taking care of the team members and then working with the client.