Planning Support

Planning plays a vital role in supporting the Corps of Engineers Civil Works water resources development mission. To learn more about planning within USACE, visit the Headquarter Project Planning page.

At IWR, we support our planning teams at our districts, divisions and Headquarters through:

• the creation and maintenance of models and tools;
• publishing helpful planning and economic guides, manuals and other documents;
• sharing lessons learned, providing training, and working with individual teams to overcome challenges; 
• helping USACE planners to engage the public in plan formulation, risk-informed planning and communication, Shared Vision Planning, collaboration, and conflict resolution;
• supporting programmatic initiatives and challenges, e.g. WRRDA 7001;
• visualizing future challenges and opportunities;
• and through supporting policy and guidance updates. 

The Future Directions Program seeks to anticipate strategic and operational level requirements for USACE Civil Works and strategic, operational and tactical level requirements for IWR. Using integrated teams, this program will identify initiatives that conceptualize water resources policies and needs for the purpose of informing and assisting in prioritization of activities by senior leadership. Working with the IWR Director and Management Team, Future Direction activities will also evaluate systemic IWR activities to identify opportunities that improve the efficiency and quality of IWR products and programs.

The Planning Associates (PA) Program is an advanced training opportunity in water resources planning offered by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The goals of the PA Program are to broaden planners’ competencies in solving complex water resources problems and challenges, and to strengthen their leadership talents.  The Program curriculum is rich in team building, leadership training, experiential training in the Corps’ Civil Works business programs, case studies, individual and group projects, instructional training and experiences, and many networking opportunities with leaders from the public and private sectors.

The PA Program is targeted to journeyman-level professionals in the field of water resources, which is generally at the GS-09 through the GS-13 level of Federal service.  The program consists of approximately 15 weeks of rigorous training over a two-year period (to include webinars) scheduled in 1-2 week blocks.​