Protect our Land, Ascend with Us!

Ascension is seeking a Senior Emergency Preparedness and Continuity Planning Subject Matter Expert to support a potential federal health agency enterprise operations and efficiency effort. This role will provide specialized expertise in mission essential planning, continuity of operations, emergency preparedness, scenario planning, mitigation frameworks, and ready-on-call operational response support.

This position is aligned to CMS’s need for mission essential planning and mitigation support, including the development and maintenance of COOP plans, emergency response procedures, scenario-based playbooks, tabletop exercises, simulations, situational awareness reporting, leadership briefings, after-action reviews, and corrective action support. The requirement specifically focuses on translating enterprise risks into actionable response frameworks and continuity capabilities that help CMS sustain essential functions during disruptions or high-impact events.

Who Ascension Is Seeking

Ascension is seeking an experienced, senior-level consultant who understands federal continuity planning, emergency preparedness, operational risk, and incident response coordination. The ideal candidate can work independently, quickly assess complex operating environments, develop practical planning tools, and advise federal leaders on how to prepare for, respond to, and recover from emergent events.

This role is important because CMS requires support that is actionable, scalable, and integrated across components and external partners. The selected consultant must be able to convert enterprise-level risks into clear playbooks, triggers, roles, responsibilities, response actions, and decision-support materials that can be used before, during, and after an event.

Summary of Contractor Role

The Senior Emergency Preparedness and Continuity Planning SME will support planning, preparedness, and response-related activities for mission essential operations. The consultant will help develop and refine COOP plans, emergency response procedures, scenario-based mitigation frameworks, tabletop exercise materials, and after-action review products.

The successful candidate should be detail-oriented, organized, responsive, and comfortable supporting senior stakeholders in an ambiguous and fast-moving environment. The candidate should be able to anticipate planning gaps, construct practical solutions, manage competing priorities, and produce high-quality deliverables with limited oversight.

This role will likely require use of federal continuity planning practices, ERM-informed risk inputs, scenario planning methods, after-action review processes, corrective action tracking, meeting facilitation, executive briefing development, and common federal productivity tools such as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, SharePoint, and possibly Power BI or other dashboard/reporting tools.

Expected Day-to-Day / Periodic Activities

• Develop, update, and operationalize COOP plans, emergency response procedures, mission essential function documentation, and related playbooks.
• Translate enterprise risks into operational scenarios, response strategies, escalation triggers, roles, responsibilities, and mitigation actions.
• Design scenario-based playbooks that support decision-making during disruptions, urgent events, or high-impact operational conditions.
• Support tabletop exercises, simulations, discussion-based exercises, readiness reviews, and workforce preparedness activities.
• Facilitate stakeholder meetings, planning sessions, working groups, and after-action discussions.
• Assess gaps in response capabilities, continuity procedures, communications workflows, and decision-support processes.
• Prepare leadership briefings, situational awareness updates, executive summaries, meeting notes, and action-item trackers.
• Coordinate response planning inputs across program, operations, risk, policy, and technical stakeholders.
• Recommend corrective actions and support validation of remediation activities after exercises or actual events.
• Maintain planning artifacts, version-controlled documents, trackers, and knowledge management repositories.
• Provide ready-on-call support when requested for urgent operational requirements, emergent events, or rapid-turn planning support.
• Align lessons learned with ERM and continuous improvement processes to strengthen future preparedness and resilience.