PPOST is a powerful tool that can be used for just about anything in emergency management planning. from multi-agency response, to initial recovery planning. It also works well for more administrative tasks such as program development or annual or project work planning.

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PPOST stands for:

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• Priorities - identify your community or organization's priorities

• Problems - identify what actual or potential problems might exist. This usually comes from conflicting priorities between programs, people or organizations.

• Objectives - Identify what needs to be done; set your objectives to solve the problems

• Strategy - identify how you are going to achieve your objectives

• Tactics - identify who is going to do what to execute on the strategies

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For some of the more involved stuff, like developing an initial community disaster recovery plan, we like to add a couple of extra pieces at the end to make it that much more useful.

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First we add Source. As we're doing our PPOST session, we create a list of where we are going to get the resources required to do the Tactics. While we are putting that list together, it enables us to do two important things:

1. create a list of how we are going to procure those resources; this also feeds into the financial planning piece nicely

2. build out an initial org chart for whatever the project or event needs to look like

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Depending on what you're doing, a good PPOST session can take an hour or it can take a day. At the end of the session, you should have a pretty good product to move forward with.

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