A strong incident management program depends on a well-crafted incident action plan (IAP). A documented set of directives activated the moment an incident occurs, an IAP delivers instructional guidance to incident response teams, so they know how to proceed.
But how to create a best-practice IAP? We take you through the steps in the following article.
What’s an incident action plan?
Indeed, incident action plans are central to successfully managing incidents. But what’s an IAP, exactly? And what’s it meant to accomplish?
According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA,) the IAP is the vehicle by which leaders on an incident communicate their expectations and provide clear guidance to those managing the incident.
In other words, the IAP provides clear direction, including a comprehensive listing of required tactics, resources, and support. And although IAPs may vary in form, they’re meant to achieve the following objectives:
- Inform incident personnel of the incident objectives for the operational period, the specific resources that will be applied, actions taken during the operational period to achieve the objectives, and other operational information (e.g., weather, constraints, limitations, etc.)
- Inform partners, Emergency Operations Center (EOC) staff, and Multiagency Coordination Group (MAC) Group members about the objectives and operational activities planned for the coming operational period
- Identify work assignments and provide a roadmap of operations during the operational period to help individuals understand how their efforts affect the success of the operation
- Demonstrate how specific supervisory personnel and various operational elements fit into the organization
- Provide a schedule of the key meetings and briefings during the operational period
Creating an incident action plan
What makes an incident action plan effective is that the various steps taken during the planning process are executed in sequence. These are the steps that will ultimately support the accomplishment of objectives within a specified time.
The incident action planning process, for its part, should be cyclical, with personnel repeating the planning steps every operational period.
Incident action plan creation during the operational period
How does it work out in the field during an actual incident, though?
Incidents are by definition chaotic, making attaining situational awareness difficult. Given the incomplete information that they have initially, Incident Commanders, during this first stage of incident management, will often only sketch out a simple, initial plan very quickly.
That initial IAP will get communicated out during oral briefings.
The response effort then evolves, with additional lead time, staff, information systems, and emergency management software and other technologies all enabling more detailed planning and cataloging of events and lessons learned.
As a result, Incident Commanders can call a strategy meeting to devise how to achieve top objectives; their response teams can then break out to analyze the response strategy, assess which tactics are the best ones to deploy as part of executing that strategy, and address resourcing questions.
That team will then reassemble for a tactics meeting to disseminate tactical decisions to response team leads (including resourcing assignments) and will afterwards break out again to analyze tactical decisions and determine what kind of support is required to gather the resources necessary to deploy tactics relating to the response strategy.
These procedures are all leading to the response team reassembling for a planning meeting to share findings and get confirmation at all levels that tactics, resources, and support are approved and that the team can move forward with the IAP as determined.
The Incident Commander will finally approve the IAP, and all team members will start the process of executing IAP-related tasks.
Of course, there’s more to incident response and management than creating an incident action plan. That’s why we created a Getting Started Guide to Incident Management to tackle end-to-end incident management.
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