Project Management Approach in Emergency Management

Article by FEMA program manager discusses basic principles for planning and emergency response-related projects

30 November 2022 – Maryland, USA – Access to a new resource has been added to the PM World Library related to emergency project management. The resource is titled “Project Management Approach in Emergency Management” is an article posted on the website domesticpreparedness.com by Adam Tager, M.S., CEM, PMP, the Disaster Readiness Program Manager in the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Mission Support Executive Office.

According to the introduction: Emergency managers are project managers. While the intersection between the two professions is not often explicitly highlighted, navigating the phases of emergency management largely follows the project management framework. Therefore, a deeper understanding of project management best practices can only serve to enhance the ability to help communities and execute no-fail missions.

According to the Project Management Institute (PMI), a leading professional organization for project managers, a project is defined as “a temporary effort to create value through a unique product, service or result,” while project management is “the use of specific knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to deliver something of value to people.” Using these definitions, projects in emergency management can include a wide range of actions such as the development of an incident action plan (IAP) (see Figure 1), the creation of a response framework, the establishment of a technical team, or the design and execution of a training exercise. For this article, the example of designing and conducting a training exercise is used as a consistent theme throughout.