Evaluating Disaster Operations Management: An Outcome-Process Integrated Approach

Humanitarian operations play a crucial role in alleviating human and social losses caused by natural disasters. The best way to know responders’ preparedness and ability to conduct efficient and effective humanitarian operations is to perform an evaluation. When evaluating humanitarian operations, the focus is mainly on their outcomes while the option of concentrating on the process is only mentioned, without examining in-depth the subject nor providing specific tools for its analysis. This study tries to fill this gap by proposing and testing an outcome/process integrated approach for the evaluation of disaster operations management. The output analysis and the process analysis of disaster operations management are performed jointly by means of a questionnaire and a modeling tool, respectively. The integrated framework proposed has been applied to the emergency response of a small non-profit organization to a flood. It has been shown that the two methods applied separately could give a distorted or partial picture of the operations under study, while the integrated framework proposed has proved to be effective, since it has brought to a deeper understanding of the processes. The approach can be used by practitioners to evaluate disaster operations management, and accurately and efficiently identify the key elements, strengths, and main weaknesses of relief operations.