The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - The Meat and Potatoes of the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program | PPP #16

Episode Date: April 9, 2020

Overview of the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP) standard for creating and evaluating exercises.

Hey everybody, Kevin Pinnell, who's at the People Process Progress Podcast. Thanks for coming back. Appreciate your likes, sharing, subscriptions, ratings, reviews, etc. Today, it's almost the end of the week. It's April 9th. It'll be the 10th tomorrow. It'll be Friday. And I thought, what better time than near the end of the

week for all of us as we go through project management incident management emergency management public safety health care whatever we're doing in the midst of this crazy covid19 action is that we should be gathering along the way and i did a couple episodes ago a lessons learned from kind of some specific lessons learned i had but in general there's a standard it's hc it's the homeland security exercise and evaluation plan and within that is an after action report slash improvement plan and that is kind of the model that you can use for exercises but more importantly to me i mean exercises are important but more importantly to me you can use this also to help frame out your lessons learned, your after action, again, being objective with that, right? And your improvement plan for real incidents, like maybe a weekly AAR IP for your COVID, your organization's COVID-19 response,

communication, coordination, whatever angles you want to cover, but it's a great template to use, chop it up and, you know, pick the different things that the it's available. If you just Google H S E E P it'll pop up on FEMA's website. There was an update to it in 2020. There's a whole lot of resources there too. HSEAP is a bigger program. It also has to do with various exercises from discussion based to actually

kind of drills where you practice one thing hands-on or full-blown exercises, full-scale rather. But this piece, I think, is critical now because as we're having shortages in supplies, as we're running into staffing, as we're facing surges, as we're managing information, whether it's true or rumors, we need to be gathering this information. And right now, it can be on a notepad, right? Just gather it on a notepad, put it together, but be ready to, at the end of all this, near the end of all this, get everyone together and have real talk on how to get better. And so I'm just going to walk through this after action report slash improvement plan template because really it speaks to pretty well some of the key things or key ways that you can do that. Again, this is focused on exercises, but, you know, going just from the first page, it's what's the name of it?

Here's what an after action improvement plan can do for you. It could say, you know, week three COVID response after action improvement plan, just keeping it simple. The next thing you go through is an exercise overview. So for this, it could be, you know, operational support overview. It could be logistics overview. If you're doing this for your section, whatever, just look at it has the name of the dates and the scope and the areas you're looking at. And you can chop all that up from the standpoint of what are we trying to evaluate this week for our section or for the whole organization. You get into kind of core capabilities, which again, it's very-based because when you conduct an exercise, you're exercising towards certain capabilities,

like what's the objective, what's the capability for preparedness or security or response or something like that. But you could put or focus on we're looking at how our surge staffing is going for objective one. We're looking at how our bed census is going. We're looking at PPE for first responders. We're looking at how well we're prioritizing strategic national stockpile assets. Whatever it is, you can just list those out there. And again, that's on page three. You can kind of see that. The other thing is the ratings. And this is where we get into being honest with ourselves, with our organizations, with not worrying about our egos, with busting through silos. And this is the hard thing that I have seen from both conducting, facilitating after action reviews and improving plans or being in them.

When not everyone is letting their ego go, when we're worried about politics, when we're worried about alienating folks. And I don't mean, you know, point fingers and really make someone feel bad after a bad thing or things didn't go perfect, just secret, nothing goes perfect, right? But just because of those other factors doesn't mean we shouldn't be honest with ourselves. Look at the news, look at your organization, look at what's happening in the world. Nobody has enough supplies, Nobody's staffed, right? There's different levels of preparedness for continuity of operations going on. There's different levels of awareness across the nation and the world for knowing how to actually have personal preparedness. There are super clear lessons learned already for everyone. So why

not start with you and your organization and be as open and honest as you can? So in this page three of this after action improvement plan, there's some definitions on how we can rate ourselves. And the first one is use the letter P. And this was performed without challenges. So we did it. It was no challenge, not a problem. That could be something that your organization has done or is doing this past week that you want to keep doing that's working good. Then there's an S, performed with some challenges. And so that means we're still doing it, but maybe not quite as efficiently and effectively as we can.

And then an M means major challenges. So performed, some challenges, major challenges, the letters. Major challenges means we're not doing it. That's going to be an area for improvement. And this is the piece where we need to be honest with ourselves, right? Don't pretend things are going really well when they're not because it's not going to help anybody else get better. You know, starting with ourselves, be honest with yourself, be comfortable speaking up to all levels of your organization. Appropriately, of course, but hopefully leadership, hopefully your colleagues are all open enough.

And at this point, you know what? Everyone's tired. We're doing our thing. But to just have conversations and say, you know what? This isn't going well. Let's figure out how we can do better. Or you know what? That's a great idea. Let's keep doing that. And that's where this needs to be. It's where we need to be focused now. And then after kind of this COVID storm has passed and we're all kind of taking a breath, we need to make sure we get together and not forget the lessons that we have. The last rating definition that's in this template is you unable to be performed. So again, in an exercise, maybe there's some stuff you couldn't do because of the artificiality of the exercise.

There's probably not a lot of things we haven't exercised at this point in COVID response, right? I mean, there's just between supply chain, safety of our people, information sharing, response. Just there's so many different things. Project management, you know, the face of everything everyone's doing is different. You know, keeping your business afloat. So I wouldn't expect to see a lot of enables. I mean, there could be, who knows about that. And then the document gets into, and like page four more, what's the objective? What was the capabilities, strengths, areas for improvement, kind of three up, three down, if you will, as a great simple model. So if you're conducting this meeting, invite key, you know, people from

every level. You're going to set up a meeting, not too long, maybe half an hour, an hour. Don't have a hundred people in there. It's not going to be effective. Do breakout groups with focus areas on, you know, pertinent, skill sets, pertinent divisions, and focus on, okay, for the objective of staffing up our company in this instance. Everybody let's let's gather verbally for folks that are comfortable tell us some things that are going well and have a scribe and have either a piece of paper or a whiteboard if folks aren't comfortable have printouts so they can write them down and then ask

the same questions for areas improvement and this series for improvement is the piece where we need to push people nothing goes perfectly ever whether it's fake whether it's for real nothing does and this is the only way we need to push people. Nothing goes perfectly ever, whether it's fake, whether it's for real, nothing does. And this is the only way we're all gonna get better is by being honest with ourselves, by taking ownership ourselves, by sharing ownership, by just being very honest with our organization, with each other.

It has to happen or we're gonna revisit the same mistakes we did last week and the week before, and that's gonna waste time and money and all the stuff that we don't need to waste. When we get back through this kind of the basic template, when we get to five, there's a cool table, and it's really helpful. This is the improvement plan. So now we've gathered, all right, what's the after action report? Here's maybe a summary of what happened this week.

Here's kind of what we were working for. Okay, we've gathered folks have said, here's some strength and we've gathered some folks that have said, okay, here are some areas for improvement, whether it's written and we compile them or verbally we describe them. And then what are we going to do about these, right? So I've talked about this before

and talking with Wendy getting to the, okay, so what? So what we have all this stuff, then what? Do we leave it in the piece of paper? Do we leave it in the typed up document and never worry about it? Because that happens also after these things there's a big pot of money that shows up because of insert disaster or ongoing trend here then we buy some cool stuff we get some training and then we forget about it well let's not do that this time right let's

actually make this improvement plan and let's do it so this improvement plan is a super simple table with the headings for the capability. So you could make that what's what we're trying to accomplish this week. What was the area for improvement? Because, again, strengths we do want to build on so we can capture those, but we really want to improve. So what was the areas for improvement? And we're going to have lines of these. Right. So we were working toward the staffing plan. Here was one area. We didn't have each position three people deep to be able to restaff. Okay, what's the corrective action? So what are we going to do for that? There's a thing here, capability element that has to do with the exercise-y kind of piece,

but you could say, you know, align that with your organization's goals or what was the, you know, something like that. Who's responsible, right, so who's the organization, the department, the person, if you want, this one, it says in the temperate primary responsible organization, but if you're doing this at a smaller level, maybe have people have their position, right, because people change, and if you want this document to be a little bit more evergreen, and someone looks at it historically, it's kind of good to have director of whatever is responsible, or an organization, police, fire, cetera. Who's the point of contact there? So that could be a position also. It could be, if you're going to work through this, the person's name,

when are you going to start this improvement plan? When do you expect to start putting work into improving that staffing plan? And when do you want to try and complete that by, right? Are you going to be able to put together a budget or put together just the plan to staff better and move people around by a certain date that's what we want to look at so the improvement plan table is what's the capability or the objective what's the area for improvement what's the corrective action to fix it who's responsible or what department or organization is responsible who's the point of contact when are you going to start doing that and when do you want to finish it? That's a super simple thing to do. You could do that

on a piece of paper. You can do it, you know, on a spreadsheet, but it's a great way to capture. And again, the value of doing this while all this stuff is still fresh in our minds is huge, and I highly recommend it. The next page just gets into who participated in the exercise, but, you know, for an after action improvement plan, um, just who, who was part of the team that was working on the stuff that you were trying to do the previous week or month or however often you want to do these. But I would start getting a regular after action improvement plan cadence now and stay in it. And then you'll have a library of documents that you can just refer to when you compile the huge, I hope, all of us do after action improvement plan. Do you need to shore up your continuity operations plan? Do you

need to update your emergency operations plan? What's your staffing model? What's your surge plan? What's your telework policy, right? These are all things that almost every company type I know of is going through right now. And so if you wait until we're two or more months down the road, if that happens, people are going to forget or they're not going to want to participate or something. So if they know, hey, every week we're getting feedback, we're going to work on it, we're going to try and do some short-term improvements, and that's totally possible, then it's just good to start building that up now. So from, again, being part of things that were kind of a show, they weren't real efforts to make improvement, to being part of

things that were really strong after action meetings and strong improvement plans, and then you see improvement, I would just like to submit to you all the listeners, which again, I'm so thankful that you're here, that we maybe heed some of this guidance that's in this template and some of the things that I spoke of, because again, to wait to the end is going to be too long. And for all of us for this one, this is huge. Let's learn from it. Let's get better. Let's fill these gaps in our plans because we all know there's tons of gaps in everyone's plans right now. There's tons of communications gaps, just a lot, right? It's in every industry that you can think of. And so I thank you for listening. I wish you all the best. I hope your

after action meetings go well, navigate the politics best you can, but just try and keep an open, honest environment, get those improvement plans working. Thank you so much for listening here. Get in touch with me at peopleprocessprogress at gmail.com if you want i'm on linkedin also we still got the covid19 incident management knowledge sharing going on there and stay safe godspeed