what is an optimal course of action coa

Best practices for developing course of Action (COA) are strategic in nature. While every case and client is different, the handling of these cases and clients can be distilled into a COA plan that can be applied in most instances. Most important to the COA plan is the establishment of objectives that comply with policy and legal requirements.

Full Answer

What is a course of action (CoA)?

Course of Action (COA) In incident-level decision making, a Course of Action (COA) is an overall plan that describes the selected strategies and management actions intended to achieve Incident Objectives, comply with Incident Requirements, and are based on current and expected conditions. Ask, “How are we going to do this?”

What are the basic components of the CoA approach?

The basic components to this approach are to break the COA into logical tasks, identify scorable metrics that are common to all tasks, and ensure that the COA achieves the desired results. In order to break down the COA, we first utilized the Universal Joint Task List (UJTL, CJCSM 3500.

What is the best CoA?

The best COA may not be the one with the highest score. A COA scoring well against many eCOAs (i. e. , robustness) rather than just an expected or most dangerous eCOA may be the more prudent choice.

What is CoA in the military?

The analysis of enemy behavior and courses of action (COA) are central research topics for military strategists. COAs designed by experts have a need to be evaluated to satisfy the Commander’s Intent.

What is a course of action COA?

In incident-level decision making, a Course of Action (COA) is an overall plan that describes the selected strategies and management actions intended to achieve Incident Objectives, comply with Incident Requirements, and are based on current and expected conditions.

What are the five criteria for COAs?

There are five fundamental issues that must be considered when developing COAs. A valid COA should be suitable, feasible, acceptable, distinguishable and complete [1].

How do I choose the best course of action?

Selecting the best course of actionCriteria. Selection is done through the application of some form of criteria, which may be consciously or subconsciously selected. ... Negative selection. Remember when you last bought or rented a home. ... Forecasting and risk analysis. ... Positive selection.

What determines if a course of action is feasible?

Feasibility. A feasible COA can accomplish the mission within the given time, space, and resource limitations. Acceptability. An acceptable COA must have the right balance among cost, risk, and the potential advantaged gained.

What are the 6 steps of MCPP?

MCPP is a six-step process (Problem Framing, Course of Action (COA) Development, COA War Game, COA Comparison and Decision, Orders Development, and Transition), guided by three tenants: top-down planning, single battle concept, and integrated planning.

Is a COA a ribbon?

The Public Health Service Commissioned Officer Association Medal is an award of the Department of Health and Human Services that recognizes any officer who is a member of the Commissioned Officer Association (COA). There is no full sized medal for this award, only a miniature medal and a service ribbon.

What does best course of action mean?

the procedures or sequence of actions that someone will follow to accomplish a goal. I plan to follow a course of action that will produce the best results.

What is a course of action example?

Someone's course of action is what that person is going to do. For example, say you're listening to your friend's vacation plans. Your friend's course of action might be: Take a flight to Paris.

What is the first step in selecting the course of action?

Selecting a focus The first step in conducting action research is to identify and define the focus of your investigation. You'll want to develop some questions about the area of your focus. Finally, you'll need to identify a plan to effectively study and answer the questions you've developed.

What are the three methods for conducting course of action analysis?

Logic, reasoning, and visualization are the key cognitive skills that staffs require to conduct COA analysis. It is essential to visualize the fight in time and space. Generally, friendly and enemy forces have the same physical limitations.

What are the common courses of action when making decisions?

The seven-step strategy is:Investigate the situation in detail.Create a constructive environment.Generate good alternatives.Explore your options.Select the best solution.Evaluate your plan.Communicate your decision, and take action.

What is a military COA?

CoA – course of action.

How do you develop a COA?

To develop a complete course of action, the staff must identify what, when, where, how, and why the unit will execute. A technique to quickly develop complete courses of action is for the XO to assemble the staff and follow the five-step method. The staff develops the courses of action together.

What should the orders development step of the MCPP communicate?

The orders development step in MCPP communicates the commander's decision in a clear, useful form that can be understood by those executing the order. Define transition. Transition is the final step of MCPP.

What is Army COA?

The Army Certificate of Achievement (COA) is a great tool for recognizing basic Soldier accomplishments. If you are a small unit leader, you should leverage this recognition tool to improve morale and performance.

What is product COA?

A Certificate of Analysis (COA) is a document that communicates the results of a scientific test done on a product such as food or drugs. The COA also lists the chemicals used in the product's manufacturing and testing and is created to ensure all important regulations are met and complied with.

How does EBO affect COA?

The impacts of implementing effects-based operations (EBO) on course of action (COA) development and evaluation will be significant. Because EBO focuses on producing effects from military activities, as opposed to the direct result of attacking targets, there is an opportunity to develop a significantly higher number of COAs that achieve the desired effects. Consequently, EBO planning will significantly increase the number of evaluated COAs and the depth of evaluation. In order to evaluate these numerous COAs, which may achieve the same desired effects by substantially different methods, metrics must be found to adequately quantify their relative merits. Desired effects may be achieved though disparate COAs, such as propaganda campaigns versus major interdictions. The Course of Action Simulation Analysis (CASA) task was created to research metrics identification, data representation and scoring approaches. This paper introduces concepts behind CASA, chronicles task results to date, and finishes with a discussion of the scoring methodologies and capabilities developed during the CASA prototyping effort. Specific areas discussed include: mission-level simulations usage to examine multiple-hypothesis solutions; ontologies and extensible mark-up language (XML) metadata representations; COA metrics identification; development of tools for data reduction, comparison and visualization; and scoring approaches. Finally, lessons learned to date are discussed.

What is attrition based scoring?

Attrition-based scoring represents one approach to answering the need to identify a common set of scoring metrics that allow disparate COAs to be directly compared. The attrition-based scoring approach attempts to consider the kinetic effects of missions, both positive and negative. In researching this approach, several templates were constructed to account for how the results of kinetic actions affected numerous facets of the battle space, including but not limited to, adversary forces; civilian populations; economics; and political, religious, and cultural infrastructures. What quickly became obvious was that each examined application of kinetic force had numerous exceptions. When the templates were combined and revised to attempt to account for all variations, they became very large and were generally sparsely populated and unwieldy. Their sparse nature forced abstraction to allow for direct comparison, with each abstraction specific to the COAs under examination. Additionally, attempting to allow for EBO considerations expanded both template size and complexity. Following numerous failed attempts to find a means to use this scoring approach, a more fundamentally abstract approach was researched.

What is ontology in CASA?

In an effort to represent data beyond two dimensions, ontologies were evaluated. An ontology is a relational model of data. Instances are created and grouped into classes based on their attributes. Inheritance-based specification of these classes ensure uniformity and data independence in the constructs. These logical groupings of data into higher-level concepts provide a clear correlation of data into information.