Planning

Comprehensive EOPs are an essential component of the emergency management program for states, tribes, territories, counties, and municipalities. Each EOP includes our custom decision aids targeting incident management activation, resource coordination, communications, and financial operations.

Ensure your employees know how to stay safe during an emergency at your facility. Our OSHA 1910.38 compliant EAPs include intuitive decision aids focused around "response actions"--simple actions an employee can take during many different hazards. During a crisis, the employee will not recall the multi-page emergency plan, though they can remember a handful of simple actions to get to safety.

Schools, healthcare facilities, and houses of worship are taking efforts to develop plans for their organizations. If your organization is under new regulatory or accreditation requirements to develop an EOP, Decision Aid can help by including custom checklists, tools, and templates for small and large organizations.

While your organization or jurisdiction's Emergency Operations Plan highlights the responsibilities to respond to an emergency, a COOP Plan focuses on maintaining essential functions, limiting disruption time, and quickly recovering your operations. We craft decision aids for topics including human resources, essential records, communications, critical systems, and relocation to assist employees with an incident that results in your facility or systems becoming inoperable.

Continuity of government ensures the integrated, collective performance of essential functions by a branch of government. Most jurisdictions have something "on the books" to deal with COG and succession but after closer review, old language in municipal charters or state constitutions leaves leadership with more questions than answers. Decision Aid can assist with the creation of draft legislation to ensure continuity of all government functions.

Decision Aid specializes on the development of business continuity plans for small to medium sized businesses--businesses that are essential to the recovery of a community after a disaster. We differ from other firms by concentrating the BCP planning process around the decision aids, checklists, and tools that will be utilized by leadership and staff during all continuity and recovery operations. If an incident has the potential to disrupt your business, it will require coordinated operations with all of your employees. Don't let that be the time for employees to get their first look at the business continuity plan binder.

Our unique approach to hazard mitigation planning combines risk analysis, community planning, and stakeholder involvement into a comprehensive risk reduction program. Decision Aid ensures your hazard mitigation plan connects to your community’s capital & master planning processes through the inclusion of our unique mitigation priority investment guides. Our team works with each community to craft a realistic mitigation planning timeline from project kickoff to FEMA plan approval. The result is a hazard mitigation plan update which guides resilience-building initiatives for the next five years.

Ask any community leader that has been through a disaster and they will tell you that they could have planned for recovery far sooner. The middle of a disaster is not the time to have your first discussion about how the community should be redeveloped to become more resilient. Pre-Disaster Recovery Planning has become increasingly popular in all levels of government as officials look for ways to shorten the recovery timeline, leverage all available cost-recovery and financing streams, and ensure maximum community involvement. Decision Aid can facilitate a robust community resilience planning process and ensure integration with hazard mitigation or community master plans.

The foundation for any crisis planning initiative is a properly designed risk assessment. Our firm incorporates historical, probabilistic, and scenario based data to develop the final assessment. A thorough risk and vulnerability assessment ensures a better allocation of limited funding and resources toward the threats and hazards most applicable to your organization or jurisdiction. Decision Aid also specializes in simplifying FEMA's Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment (THIRA) methodology to reduce staff & stakeholder time commitments.

An Emergency Operations Plan is meant to provide a flexible framework for your jurisdiction's emergency response protocols. The EOP does not detail the unique distinctions between hazard types. Jurisdictions and organizations look to Decision Aid for hazard specific annexes tailored to the hazard's unique characteristics and the organization's response capabilities. From Active Shooter to Hazardous Materials plans, Decision Aid can create a resource with useful checklists and job aids for the most frequently occurring and most severe hazards in your jurisdiction. Our approach sets the stage for a training program and exercise series based on the hazard type of your choice.

Some functions within an emergency plan are so critical that it becomes valuable to develop a specific resource to guide your team. Critical emergency functions like sheltering, evacuation, reunification, debris management, public health, public information, alerting, and crisis communications are popular plans developed by Decision Aid to enhance your emergency response program. Regulatory and accreditation agencies may require specialized plans for your organization's most critical functions. We incorporate job aids into all functional plans to ensure your staff are guided through their specific actions to effectively perform during crisis.

Decision Aid uses research-proven approaches to develop useful, intuitive, and accurate incident management tools. Whether they are enhancing an existing plan or will serve as the foundation for your emergency operations program, our decision aids are based upon years of experience and reference lessons learned from around the world. Our products include decision tools for leadership & management, checklists and job aids for critical emergency functions, standard operating procedure & guidelines, and templates to simplify repetitive actions & quickly complete forms.