The Disaster Recovery Priority Ranking Tool: A Thinking Tool for Prioritizing Post-COVID-19 Recovery Initiatives

Abstract

Disaster Recovery Priority Ranking tool is a spreadsheet-based decision-making tool designed to help managers apply a set of evaluation criteria to a variety of recovery-focused strategic initiatives. It is particularly useful for prioritizing initiatives that require cross-departmental or inter-organizational cooperation and partnerships. By engaging in conversations about criteria for evaluating the success of various initiatives and then assessing various recovery actions on these criteria, you can prioritize your action planning to both effectively and efficiently get essential initiatives up and running. The tool allows managers to list and weight various initiatives on key evaluation criteria under different scenarios to help them think through the planning and implementation process post-COVID-19. The results tab in the tool provides the priority ranking along with a color-coded evaluation of each initiative on the criteria for each scenario. While the priority tool is self-explanatory and designed to be easy to use, this report offers a brief description and example of how to use the tool. Making judgment-based decisions on many different “must-do” recovery initiatives is not easy, particularly when different scenarios of economic recovery, virus spread, resurgence, and public health responses are possible. This tool is offered to help improve your ability to set priorities when doing scenario planning.