Assessing Your Emergency Management Program
What criteria can an emergency management agency use to determine program success? How does an organization know if its emergency management program is successful?
Throughout a program’s lifespan (preparedness phase), these are some of the hard questions that need asking. Unfortunately, due to a number of reasons, assessing whether a program is succeeding or failing to meet its intended outcomes gets lost overtime.
Changes to policy, staff turnover (knowledge transfer gaps), disasters, and misunderstanding of an agency’s strategic plan can get in the way of measuring the effectiveness of emergency management programming.
So how do we assess programming?
Planning is a critical first step.
Determining the assessment’s budget, staff allocation, and desired length of time is required so the assessment lead can define a successful outcome and timeline. Moreover, consideration of who should be involved in the assessment is important.
Who should assist with providing data?
What methods of data collection are the most relevant?
Who can support with planning or project management?
Also consider what parts of the program should be analyzed. All programs have goals, delivery staff (who have assigned functions or tasks) and a requirement for those staff to have specific skills, experience, and technical and behavioral competencies. Analyzing the program’s goals, function’s, or required competencies is critical.
2. Existing versus desired performance
After the assessment’s plan is developed and communicated, data needs to be gathered. Data from this step can come in many formats:
Reviewing post incident assessments, staff job descriptions, process diagrams, media reports (including social media).
Staff surveys to gauge administration issues
Individual and group interviews
Client or program user feedback
Observations of staff routines and workflow
If available, reach out to staff that were part of the program’s original design and development team. They should have insight regarding the program’s original intent. All too often, this data is lost due to retirements, attrition, or promotions to other areas of the organization.
3. Validate the reasons for the performance issues
Typically, performance issues are a result of an issue within a program’s logic model. Potentially, there are issues rooted in the organization’s inputs and activities which in turn drive outputs that do not support the desired short or long-term outcomes.
Functional job level causes
Staff not aware of their role or responsibilities
Inadequate skill sets on the team
Staff may not have the right tools or resources
Process and procedures level causes
Inefficient process or workflow
Too much or not enough process
Procedures change without proper communication
Organization level causes
Organizational structure may not support the desired short and long term outcomes
Desired performance outcomes are not aligned with the vision and mission
4. Getting to better performance
After data has been analyzed against the desired short and long-term outcomes, priorities must be set. What performance issues exist and how will they be prioritized? Based on priorities, what solutions can be implemented to manage the performance to the desired level?
Solutions can include:
Staff role and responsibility changes
Staff training, mentoring, or coaching
Technology updates
Process improvements
A strategic functional review of the organizational structure
Getting to better performance typically means change at the job level or organizational level. Either way, organizations should be prepared to develop a change management plan that will help staff adjust. With any change, performance tends to get worse but after the change, the improvements will take the organization to better outcomes.
Brad Ison
Brad Ison is a professional coach, disaster management professional, facilitator, and speaker. To find out more contact Brad directly by emailing him at brad.ison@hazardscape.com
