The Crisis Plan as a Flowchart and Process Map

Prepare Your Crisis Management Team

Simple flowcharts and process maps can be incredibly useful to support with preparing or revising your emergency plan. 

It’s evident that all exercises are better than none, but during a compressed preparedness exercise, not all sections are presented with the same weighting. Prior to the commencement of an exercise, you will have notified everyone who is going to rehearse, and then you get started. But in a real incident, some responders could be notified before others, it takes time before those who have been notified are mobilised and in place and the few who will handle the incident in an early phase, must remove all inquiries. It does not always come across as well in the evaluation of the exercises. Therefore, we recommend utilising a flowchart to outline how the notification should ideally have gone, and check whether this happened during the exercise. 

Simple sketches with flowcharts give a more digestible overview when you are preparing a new plan, or if you are going to revise an existing one. Here you can easily get a summary of who is notified when, in what order and by whom. Is there anyone who must be notified before others, possibly the authorities? 

A crisis is usually not like an exercise that gets over in a few hours. The COVID pandemic we have been dealing with in recent years is a good example of this. But other, resource-demanding crises can also tie up Key employees for days and weeks. What about the simple things, i.e. Catering, changing of guard, handing over to the next guard Team and so on? Perhaps there is a need for accommodation for several of the employees? All these aspects “drown” a little if the crisis plan does not consider the fact that a crisis often has several “phases”. Therefore, a simple process map can also be a useful aid.

Managing a Crisis Situation with the Help of Charts

When you start from some of the imagined crisis scenarios that business May encounter, to outline the handling as a process, it becomes easier to build a plan for the various phases.

To get a good overview of notifications, you can start with your crisis scenarios and outline the order in which the various actors are notified.

The example below is taken from the initial phases of work on a new emergency plan for a Norwegian shipping company that operates supply ships in the North Sea. Here, several different crisis scenarios were outlined as processes, dependencies drawn up and action cards for the various functions created for the various phases:

The flowchart also shows who notifies external actors, in this case the Norwegian central rescue service and the coastal administration, etc. In this case, the responsibility for first notification lies with the ship’s captain, who notifies hrs and the emergency manager on duty. The captain is then released to handle the incident on site. All other notifications are now the responsibility of the emergency manager on duty. The emergency manager assesses, based on the extent of the incident, the need for assistance and alerts and mobilises accordingly.

This is then portrayed in a simple process map, where the order of the tasks and who is responsible is represented better. For example, a notification must take place first, before one can mobilise and then handle the incident.

The main processes contain sub-processes with associated actions that must be carried out. This operates with functions, not persons. This makes the plan more robust. The function has tasks, and based on available personnel, the functions to be covered are distributed. It may also be that an individual must cover several functions, in cases where there is a shortage of personnel, for example in the initial phase of a crisis if this occurs at night on a day off. It May then take time before everyone is in the place and operational.

The tasks are divided into functions and described in action cards or action cards, as exampled below:

This simplified manner of visualising incident and crisis management makes it far easier to get an overview, and to communicate the plan in connection with training. It is also a good aid in the evaluation of exercises and real events.