NC State Emergency Management and Mission Continuity welcomes the opportunity to partner with You!
NC State is committed to ensuring that our campus community is properly prepared for unplanned emergencies through coordinated planning, communication, response and recovery measures. This is accomplished by routinely reviewing and assessing emergency practices and protocols, communications channels, plans and procedures, and conducting a variety of disaster/emergency response drills. Each of these activities engages campus stakeholders as well as external emergency preparedness and response partners.
Does this sound like you? Do you have a communication plan? Do you know what to do and where to go when an emergency happens? We can help!
Are you PACK Ready? Let’s Build a Plan in a Year!
Building emergency plans can be an overwhelming process – what do I have to plan for? Who should be included in the planning? Who is affected and how will we continue operations? Plan building feels like a humongous puzzle – but once you have all the pieces together, the outcome is one complete picture!
Emergency Management and Mission Continuity (EMMC) has a plan just like you – and in the process of updating EMMC’s own plan, we experienced this feeling of “huge”. In reality, writing a plan is taking what your team does every day in their jobs and gathering, organizing and recording that information for quick reference. In reality, it’s a lot of small, easy tasks that when drawn together create the basis for your PACK Ready emergency plan.
Let’s start small and go from there!
EMMC continues to work with critical campus services to maintain plans and expanding planning to all areas on campus is a work in progress. In reality, a plan is never finished. It’s a work in progress that needs a little bit of attention often – did staff change? New phone numbers? New processes? What should you consider if there is an incident and you can’t get into your building to work?
Thinking about our planning partners, we can help you gather information in chunks – one topic per month for one year! That seems like a long time to write a plan, but in essence, the meat of the plan will be tackled first! Here’s the plan for building your plan:
- One topic per month, with templates, guidance and feedback
- Clear time commitments and outcomes for each topic
- EMMC will be glad to facilitate a planning meeting with each topic, but having a small working group tackling the topics for your group makes perfect sense – you do the jobs!
PACK Plan Perfection in one year!
With a topic per month, the result is then one plan with twelve components, with renewal and refreshing as needed (or at least when prompted by testing and signatures!) Taking the topics one piece of the planning puzzle at a time will allow teams to tackle finite planning areas that EMMC will compile into your overall PACK Plan.
Step 1 – Getting Started (20 Minutes):
- If you haven’t already, access your Pack Plan folder on Google Team Drive
- If you don’t have a Pack plan established, email EMMC and we’ll set one up for you!
TIP: Take note of what you don’t know and are unsure of along the way. These will be captured as actions items. Don’t stop if you run into a roadblock; just list it as a task for later. It is okay to say you don’t know!
Step 2 – Who do you have on staff? (1.5 hours):
- If you do not already have one, develop a contact list with the home contact information of everyone on your team. This list should be:
- In the format of your choosing (though you are welcome to use our template from Google Drive)
- Held or accessible by enough people (both physically and digitally) to be useful
- Treated as confidential
- Stored securely at home and at work
- Updated at least twice a year
Consider updating your employee record in MyPack portal at the same time.
Ready? Set, GO!
Each month, EMMC will publish a monthly task for your team to tackle. Each post will have templates, resources, instructions, links and contact information – everything you need to schedule a time for your team to meet and tackle that piece! All the content can be updated in real-time in your team’s PACK Plan in Google Team Drive! Don’t have a plan folder that you see for your team, email us and we’ll get you set up!
This is an iterative process – there is no set start date or deadline….You do not need to start your planning in January and end in December. You do not need to complete each step in a month; you can combine two into one month, or spread one over three months. The important goal is to have a plan – with content and authenticity so you can use it!
This post is part of a series breaking the process of emergency preparedness and mission continuity planning for NC State departments into monthly tasks to help build a plan in a year.