EMERGENCY RESPONSE PLANNING BLOG

Tips for Developing a Successful Emergency Management Program

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1. Identify vulnerabilities and hazards associated with your operation and what plans are required. Ensure that emergency, business continuity, and security issues are considered and use this analysis to prioritize your plan development efforts.
2. Based on the analysis above, determine what plan types should be developed and which should be developed on a facility level, regional level, or enterprise-wide level. For instance, site-specific fire pre-plans may be valuable for buildings and storage tanks that contain flammable contents; business continuity plans may be applicable at the corporate level.
3. Determine how much overlap of data will exist between each plan type and among common plan types that may be required for multiple facilities. For instance, are there common company contacts required in more than one plan?
4. Identify regulatory requirements and ensure that your program addresses them, but remember that the primary purposes of the plans are to enable your company to respond effectively, and in the process, to ensure compliance.
5. Develop plans in a logical format that will be intuitive to responders that may not have had a lot of time to review them. A good test is to provide the plan to someone outside the organization and find out how long it takes for them to find required information with no training to previous review. Select the following link for an example plan format.
6. Ensure that plan content is comprehensive enough to provide tools needed for a response, but is not so detailed that it reduces the effectiveness of the plan and results in more plan maintenance that is necessary.
7. Develop the content in streamlined format to reduce time required to read it. Bullet points and checklists are favorable to paragraphs of information.
8. Determine the amount of information contained in the plans that is likely to require annual revisions, i.e. contact information, site-specific response procedures, and processes for conducting annual reviews and length of time anticipated to facilitate these revisions.
9. Based on the above analysis, determine if paper-based plans can be developed in a reasonable amount of time and can be maintained effectively, and consider the benefits of a web-based approach that links all common information via an integrated database and provides superior accessibility for responders.
10. Ensure that a plan is developed for training plan holders and for exercising each plan. Training and plan testing will help to identify areas that need to be fine-tuned.

For more tips and best practices on designing a crisis management program, download our Free Best Practices Guide.