Know Your Gaps Before Disaster Strikes
Five Steps to Assess and Strengthen Your Emergency Management Capabilities
This is a free article and part of the “Project Management in Emergency Management Playbook” for Academy Subscribers.
One of the most impactful decisions emergency management executives make is determining which preparedness projects and initiatives to prioritize each year. Whether your organization has a large team and a meaningful budget or you're managing a lean team, selecting initiatives that deliver the greatest impact during disasters separates the organizations that thrive during crises from those caught unprepared after squandering their precious time left of bang.
To maximize the effectiveness of your preparedness program, a deliberate, proven approach to assessing your emergency management capabilities is essential. A structured capability assessment helps ensure your time, money, and resources are strategically focused on the highest-value projects and the initiatives that meaningfully enhance your readiness. Without such a process, organizations risk making critical decisions based on subjective judgments or incomplete information, which can result in missed opportunities and avoidable vulnerabilities.
This article details the structured and tested capability assessment process we have successfully implemented for state and local governments, offices of emergency management, public safety agencies, utilities, healthcare organizations, corporate security programs, and disaster-focused nonprofits. Unlike the assessment conducted during post-incident after-action review processes, this approach empowers your organization to proactively identify gaps and strategically choose initiatives and projects that enhance your readiness long before the next disaster occurs.
Understanding "Capability"
Before diving into the assessment process, it's crucial to clarify what a "capability" truly means in emergency management. A capability represents readiness in action and comes from integrating comprehensive plans and policies, trained personnel who understand their roles, adequate resources and equipment to execute plans, and strong partnerships necessary for implementation. Additionally, a true capability has been tested and validated through exercises or real-world incidents to confirm it functions effectively.
Since it is often confused on social media and in sales presentations, buying a piece of equipment or technology does not automatically produce a capability if there isn't a plan and trained personnel to put that piece of equipment to work in a way that provides the desired benefit to the organization.
The Five-Step Capability Assessment Process
To conduct an objective, thorough capability assessment tailored to your operational readiness, we recommend a straightforward five-step project. This assessment should ideally be led by the program manager responsible for the capability if being conducted internally, or coordinated by the program manager for an external assessment.
Step 1: Project Kickoff
The kickoff phase sets the tone for the assessment, involving key leaders and stakeholders who will influence or determine the success of the process. During this initial stage, you'll:
Clearly define the scope and objectives of the assessment.
Design stakeholder engagement strategies and communication plans.
Develop and secure agreement on the specific criteria used to measure capability.
This last element—establishing clear, agreed-upon assessment criteria—cannot be overstated. Effective assessments don't rely on intuition or "knowing what is good or bad when you see it"; they rely on clearly articulated standards. After over a decade writing about, studying, practicing, and teaching situational awareness, I can tell you one thing: if you don't know what you're looking for, you will never find it. At least not intentionally. Establishing criteria early ensures objectivity and clarity throughout the entire assessment, and it develops an assessment process that can be replicated in future years.
To further enhance the assessment, consider integrating artificial intelligence tools to analyze open-source documents, such as after-action reports or case studies from similar organizations. I've worked this into my process lately, and it has been incredibly helpful to surface trends and lessons learned, ensuring your assessment emphasizes the most impactful and relevant areas of focus.
Step 2: Document Review
With clear criteria defined, the next phase involves systematically reviewing all relevant documentation—including plans, policies, training materials, guidance documents, and past after-action reports (real world incidents and exercises). When I conduct assessments, I frame each assessment criteria as a question to be answered through the review.
This step of the assessment produces two necessary advancements in the project:
Preliminary findings and observations about the current state of the capability are identified as each assessment element gets addressed.
Targeted questions are identified that will guide stakeholder interviews, addressing key gaps in the assessment, clarifying ambiguous language (and whether it impacts response operations), and validating idealized processes ("does it actually work that way?").
Step 3: Stakeholder Engagement
Engaging stakeholders is vital to ground-truthing your document review findings and validating the practical effectiveness of your plans and processes. Stakeholders—including policy leaders, agency representatives, external partners, and community members—provide valuable insights into operational realities, revealing gaps between documented procedures and the actual way things are done.
This phase includes two main components:
Qualitative Interviews: Structured discussions to capture in-depth insights and practical experiences from stakeholders.
Quantitative Surveys (optional): Broader stakeholder surveys designed to collect quantifiable data, useful for data-driven executive decision-making.
Stakeholder engagement ensures that the assessment accurately reflects the perspectives of your staff and response partners, the operational environment, and identifies recurring themes and priorities for improvement.
Step 4: Analysis, Reporting, and Recommendations
The fourth phase transitions from assessment to actionable recommendations. In our experience, we've found that effective reports blend educational context, factual insights, and clear, prioritized recommendations. Specifically, the report should:
Educate readers, clarifying why each capability is critical.
Summarize key findings from document review and stakeholder engagement.
Offer clear, actionable recommendations and project suggestions.
Prioritize recommendations to guide strategic planning and resource allocation decisions.
An effective capability assessment report should empower executives to confidently select projects aligned with strategic objectives, addressing the most critical gaps in organizational readiness.
Step 5: Project Closeout
The final phase transitions the project into a way forward. The Project Closeout Meeting offers an opportunity to review the assessment's goals and objectives and discuss any additional work required to progress into the next steps.
Conclusion
The goal isn't to conduct an assessment just for the sake of it; it’s to identify the projects that can advance the program and ensure the capability delivers on expectations. Implementing this structured, comprehensive five-step capability assessment process ensures your emergency management program's strategic direction is clear, evidence-based, and impactful. By methodically evaluating your organization's readiness against well-defined standards and incorporating the practical insights of stakeholders, you significantly reduce the risk of biased, reactionary, or uninformed project selection.
This structured assessment approach yields multi-year strategic guidance, eliminating the need for unnecessarily frequent reassessments and allowing your organization to focus on impactful, high-return projects. Ultimately, executives equipped with this level of detailed, prioritized information are better positioned to allocate resources strategically, enhancing their organization's long-term resilience and ensuring optimal readiness when disaster inevitably strikes.
For more information on how The CP Journal conducts a capability assessment tailored to your organization's specific needs, review our service offerings or contact us directly to discuss the 35 criteria that we use in each of our assessment projects.