QuEP: Building a Continuous Improvement of Emergency Plans Management

While different governments worldwide have published sets of recommendations-or even laws-for increasing preparedness, a reference framework to assess the level of compliance of organizations is still to come. For instance, emergency plans often remain stored in closets where they stay until some emergency or major legal change occurs. Consequently, achieving actual preparedness is difficult to assess. QuEP is a framework for the assessment and improvement of the management of emergency plans within organizations. It is inspired by the Total Quality Management strategy, and provides a hierarchy of emergency plan management maturity levels. The aim of QuEP is to guide organizations to assess and improve their emergency preparedness by following a set of principles, practices and techniques at the technical, human and strategic levels. In this paper, we show the model underlying the framework, and give details of the current framework evaluation processes.