Using any or all sources that you have been exposed to throughout the term, you will create a strategic plan (10–12 pages) to improve collaboration between the agencies that are involved in homeland security and emergency response in your city. Be sure to describe how your plan will encourage agencies to work together and avoid turf wars with regard to information and jurisdiction.
For this assignment, the strategies and plans listed in the resources for this and the other units provide examples of plans that you may use as a template. Because of the page limit, it is unlikely that an entire strategic plan is achievable. Therefore, you should focus on preparing a collaboration annex to the plan that you select.
You will again approach it from the perspective of an emergency planner for the real-world county that you have employed all term. (Again, please use a pseudonym when referring to this county.)
Choose either an emergency operations plan or a subject-specific plan (such as pandemic influenza, school safety and preparedness, information sharing, establishing a fusion center, or any other reasonable topic).
Locate an annex in any plan or strategy; it does not need to be the plan that you have selected to contribute to for this assignment.
You are going to produce a collaboration annex to a plan that is used (actually or hypothetically) by your county.
Provide definitions and explanations for key terms, including interagency, partners, collaborative relationships, coordination, and team-building.
Develop and describe 3–5 primary overarching objectives for collaboration and coordination. These are strategic and therefore conceptual; you will be more specific later.
These objectives should be as detailed as possible to include information as to why and how they should be pursued and achieved.
An example of an objective may be to seek consensus with the subsequent rationale for this, potentially including focusing the team on a single end state, permitting all partners to have some ownership on the plan’s elements or overall goals, or demonstrating respect for all partners’ perspectives.
These components must be fully explained.
Identify at least ten stakeholders with whom the county will need to collaborate for this specific plan. Describe the following for each partner:
The specific capabilities that it brings to bear
Benefits that it will reap from collaboration
Challenges that collaboration or partnering will create for it
Points of contact for each partner agency
Any other information that you feel is relevant
Educate prospective partners on methods that the county will use to promote collaboration.
Select or originally design at least four methods, programs or approaches designed to foster collaboration.
You have learned about some methods and can locate many more in available strategies and operating procedures, especially those focused primarily on interagency coordination.
You may choose methods from existing sources, design your own programs, or combine both forms; if you use a method from another source, you must properly reference it.
Identify and describe at least three ways that partners will be incorporated into exercises; make these descriptions detailed, logical, and relevant to the success of this specific plan.
Write a short summary wrapping up the intentions of your annex.
