As the United States heads into the coldest months of the year, electric utilities are facing the daunting task of responding to increasingly frequent and severe meteorological events and energy source transitions while maintaining reliable service to their customers. Utilities are turning to program assessments so they can gain clarity as to the readiness of their emergency management programs. Program assessments can identify the challenges an existing program is facing, recognize the structures that work well, and provide an opportunity for stakeholders to define how they want to enhance their emergency preparedness program. Incorporating components of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)’s Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment (THIRA) and Stakeholder Preparedness Review (SPR) process, Hagerty has developed a proven three-step approach to program assessments that supports program resilience and continued improvement.
Program Baseline: Paper vs. Practice
The first two steps in program assessments are understanding how a program intends to operate and defining how a program operates in practice. Together, these two steps allow the Hagerty team to develop a program’s baseline. Hagerty’s approach to baseline identification requires gathering both quantitative and qualitative data and is the starting point for our program assessment.
To establish this baseline, Hagerty reviews existing plans and procedures to determine how policies and processes are intended to support the utility. These plans vary from utility to utility but often include emergency operations plans, organizational charts, hazard-specific plans, and reports from past incidents and activations. By reviewing these plans, Hagerty’s team creates the first part of the utility’s baseline assessment: how the emergency management functions operate on paper.
Where Paper and Practice Differ: A key component to developing high-impact and actionable recommendations for utilities is identifying the differences between procedures as documented and procedures in practice.
After completing our document review, Hagerty’s team conducts structured interviews and workshops to understand how plans are interpreted and operationalized in efforts to have plans executed as intended. Interviews provide an opportunity for key players throughout an organization to candidly share their understanding of practices – both those outlined in policies and those that are operationalized. Workshops bring together small groups of individuals from an organization to discuss how policies are operationalized, providing insight into both the operation and dynamics within an organization. The findings from these structured interviews provide the qualitative data for the program’s baseline assessment.
Looking to the Future
Hagerty goes beyond conventional program assessments and takes our clients a step further. The final step in our program assessment seeks to understand our clients’ preparedness aspirations through carefully curated workshops. In these conversations, Hagerty works side-by-side with a utility’s internal stakeholders to develop a shared vision of how a program can increase its resilience and the tangible steps that could drive progress.
These discussions, along with the program’s baseline, support the development of actionable recommendations to strengthen the utility’s resilience over the short- and long-term. By working with a utility’s internal stakeholders throughout the assessment process, our team can develop recommendations that are meaningful to the organization. In developing these recommendations, Hagerty’s goal is greater than that of typical program assessments. Recommendations prioritize considering the ways a utility can best utilize its existing resources to the fullest capacity first and foremost. With our recent clients, recommendations have included integrating existing emergency management policies and developing a more unified approach across the organization. This “one organization” approach supported streamlining throughout the organization’s processes, such as decreasing the number of exercises by having more focused, intentional exercise scenarios and participants. After identifying the ways in which a utility can deploy its existing resources more efficiently, Hagerty’s recommendations then highlight opportunities for introducing new systems and resources to support an organization’s continued success.
Hagerty Can Help
Hagerty supports electric utilities with a wide variety of preparedness and resilience measures. Our Energy Sector team is made up of subject matter experts – both emergency managers and utility operators and executives – who prioritize addressing the unique needs of each electric utility they support. By developing scalable program assessments, Hagerty can provide electric utilities with an overview of their program – and their program’s goals – that match the needs of each provider.
Marina Conner is a Managing Associate with eight years of experience in emergency preparedness specializing in incident command, accreditation, as well as planning, training, and exercises in both educational and practical settings. Currently, she is supporting clients with a range of state, local, and energy resiliency projects.