Let’s Get One Thing Clear
Project Management in Emergency Management | Chapter 1
This article is part of the “Project Management in Emergency Management Playbook” for Academy Subscribers.
As an emergency manager, you already have a lot on your plate. You’re working to advance your readiness for future disasters. You have planning initiatives underway, exercises in development, after-action reports to write, and improvement plans to complete.
At every step along the way, you're engaging people from different departments across your organization, responding to questions from executives or elected officials, speaking with community members, and attending planning or committee meetings with your regional partners.
And that’s just on “blue-sky” days. When disaster strikes and the Emergency Operations Center activates, your focus shifts to round-the-clock response efforts.
It doesn’t take much for this delicate balance of commitments to collapse—for your carefully laid preparedness goals and work plans to get knocked off course without any chance of recovery.
Here’s the thing: learning about project management isn’t about adding yet another task to your already full plate. It’s about getting those projects done, so your work produces meaningful improvements to your disaster preparedness.
It’s about making sure your emergency plans don’t sit as unfinished drafts but are finalized, trained to, and tested in realistic exercises. It’s about avoiding the last-minute scramble of writing exercise injects or arranging food for participants the night before an event.
Mastering project management ensures you can complete projects quickly and efficiently, freeing you and your team to focus on what matters most: preparing for the next challenge or responding to an incident without a backlog of unfinished work looming over you.
But let’s be clear—this playbook isn’t about generic project management. It’s designed specifically for emergency managers and public safety professionals building the capabilities their community and organization need to prepare for an uncertain future.
So much of the project management resources available are from the construction and engineering industries, where people are building actual buildings or for IT professionals upgrading a piece of their enterprise software. While those fields may offer lessons, their priorities and challenges are different.
Our focus is on what helps us prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters.
With over two decades of experience in planning and executing projects, I’ve developed my approach in local government and the military, as an emergency management and homeland security consultant, and as a portfolio manager overseeing project teams. I've also used them as a business owner developing new products and as a volunteer leading disaster recovery projects. Projects have been the common theme throughout my career. I’ve applied these principles during high-pressure incident responses, where time is of the essence, and during long-term preparedness projects that threaten to stretch indefinitely if left unmanaged.
The process I’m sharing in this playbook is adaptable, not one-size-fits-all. It’s designed to fit the unique demands of your projects.
By integrating these practices into your preparedness projects, you’ll find yourself getting more projects DONE, building a skill set that directly translates to the response and recovery environments that drew you to this field in the first place, and making meaningful progress toward readying your organization and community for the future.
Emergency managers can be the unsung heroes in public safety, tackling challenges that most people never even think about until it is too late. This playbook is here to support you, not just with ideas but with proven, practical strategies. I’m excited for you to dive in, apply these methods, and share your successes.
Let’s get started.