The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - Can AI Revolutionize Public Safety and Project Management?

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

In this episode, Can AI Revolutionize Public Safety and Project Management? We explore how artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping how we plan, respond, and lead in complex environments.Key takeaways:How to get your PEOPLE ready with an AI readiness assessmentWhere to fit AI into your organization's PROCESSWhen to measure PROGRESS with an AI impact dashboardPeople first. Process aligned. Progress together.

Welcome to the All Hazards Project Management series of the People Process Progress Podcast. I'm your host, Kevin Pennell, and what we're going to talk about today in this kickoff episode is the role of artificial intelligence in helping project managers and public safety professionals lead smarter, communicate faster, and respond better. So who am I? I am Kevin Pennell, your host. I'm a project management professional. I'm a certified planning section chief.

I was on the Type three incident management team, but we organized and coordinated and supported events of type one national level event. I'm also a project management leader currently at the HealthCorridor IT space. I was in the US Navy as a hospital corpsman. In public safety, I was a volunteer firefighter and an EMT and an EMS captain.

I was a member of an incident management team, which I mentioned already. So I was a planning section chief, which is the project manager of the team and a medical unit leader. So the corpsman of the team, go figure, is a stretch there, right? And I'm also the author of a book

called The Stability Equation. So I mentioned that if you're having trouble, you're a first responder, you're a veteran, you're anybody in midlife like I was, you're having problems with dealing with stress. I touch on the value that I found in taking ownership, practicing mindfulness, getting regular movement, setting boundaries, making connections,

getting better sleep, which is critical, and having faith. Those are what I call the seven pillars. It's on Amazon, Stability Equation, check it out. That's all I'll say about that till the end. And then I'm a video uploader. I have a Penelify Fitness Club YouTube channel where I share fitness 15 seconds at a time, cold plunge, jujitsu stuff.

So that's who I am. That's why I'm talking about this today is all hazards project management. It's actually a course I've taught to fire department. And it's also something I spoke to the Project Management Institute about. And to me, there's so many parallels and blendings of skills and mindsets

from public safety folks who are tasked with leading projects. We're gonna replace all the ladders or we need to get new vests or whatever it is to the project management world, whether it's healthcare IT, whether it's construction, whether it's financial, the planning core aspects are the same.

And so what I'm gonna touch on today is what is AI, right? Artificial intelligence is everywhere, and that's a good thing, right? There's some scary things like Terminator movies, but the key for us is to use AI to augment our abilities, right, not replace them. And AIs help me format things like the show. How do I make an outline really fast

as opposed to me typing it up? And it doesn't replace us, and it shouldn't replace you as you write, as you think of the best way to plan an event or have a response, but it is important to figure out how to use these tools, right? It's a tool that can be in the toolbox of public safety and project management professionals,

and they goosh and embrace it. So what is it? Here's the definition from IBM, right? It's a system of machines, they mimic human intelligence, they take on tasks and then they learn from it. And that's the bold part there that you see. And that's really it.

And again, we've seen all the scary movies about the Matrix and the Terminator and things like that. But AI is a great tool and I have found in planning and I'll touch on some of those now. We'll talk about the people, the process and the progress that teams, whether you're a public safety department trying to embrace AI or whatever entity that's doing project manager, you're a project manager, is how can we do this? How can we first make sure that our people are ready?

So it's relevant because 70% of organizations use it, according to a McKinsey and Company study. And so that means a lot of companies out there. And if you wanna be a company that's on the cutting edge or a department, you know, a 911 operation center that's on the cutting edge is doing the best they can for the people and the public, then you'd probably need to look into AI some more

if you're not already and catch up. But there's time, right? It's still early, even though there's some pretty mature AI models out there, but we need to get after a little bit, right? And it's not coming, it's already here. So let's start with the people. If our people don't see the value

of artificial intelligence or AI, then they're never gonna adopt it. This is a core tenant of change management, right? The ad-car model, there's an awareness and a desire. Well, we as leaders, whatever level you're at, you could be a lieutenant tasked to take on a project to set up some sort of event for your department. You could be the senior project manager

helping lead this big initiative. And if your initiative is to help figure out how to bring AI on, the first thing we have to see is be able to show value. And so this starts kind of our change management mindset. The other thing is, if our people don't have the knowledge, they have no idea what AI is, how to use it, how we can fit into our organization. I'm going to talk about that in this video and on this podcast. So I'm recording audio for the podcast as well.

Then it's also going to fail. So we need to show people value and then we need to make sure they have the knowledge. Because again, if we don't and we try and implement AI, it's going to be failure. We're going to waste time and money and we'll think, oh, it's cool. We got it in. You may get it in, but your people will never use it. So let's talk about how we can do a readiness assessment, what we need to ask each other to get our people ready. Right. And the first is, do we know what it is? Do our people know what it is? What is artificial intelligence? Some people might hear about it, but they may have never used it. And then we need to see, you know, what can it do for our whole department or for our organization?

What's the value AI provides this organization as a whole where there's areas? And so there are going to be some strategic looks at what AI can do for us. And then a little more tactical where we think about what can it do to help me and then by default then our people individually in their work. And these are quick assessments, right? There's probably way more in-depth assessments. And when you get into technical specs, essentially to put the AI thing into your environment, then you'll get into the more technical details.

But upfront, if you're looking at your people first, which we always should, we just go, what is AI? How can it help our department or organization? And how's it going to help our people do their work? And so let's talk process, right? Go figure, people process progress. How do we do this? Well, let's think about the repetitive tasks

that we often do in the incident command world or the public safety world and even projects. We want their smart objectives, right? Their specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-based objectives or goals. Some people call them smart goals, but we use objectives and it's a command system. I like doing the same thing at project management.

And then key performance indicators, right? If you know that you want to go from paper to electronic, you could just say, I'm going from paper to an electronic system, put that in your favorite AI thing, chat GBT, Gemini, whatever, copilot, and it'll spit out some really great pre-written and then you can tweak them,

make them fit your organization. But that's a quick automation where you can throw that into the AI tool and have it spit out those things for you, those objectives and KPIs. And a quick tip about smart objectives that I learned from a mentor along the way, you can have some standard smart objectives and then change a couple things for each incident.

So you could preload those for every kind of incident or special event that you have or project and then people can just kind of pull them off the shelf if you will. The other thing is to transfer handwritten IEPs into digital format. Now to do this we kind of go old school but new school. You could take a picture of the document, throw it in your chat GBT app or whatever app, and then it'll format, it'll put it into a document for you, right, which is pretty awesome. So if you had, let's say, a handwritten one you got some from somebody and you wanted to use elements of it, or you could do old school and scan it in, but a picture these days from your phone, putting it in there, it will, AI will

then put all the components that you've just taken a picture of into an actual document for you, which is pretty awesome. So the other thing is time consuming stuff, right? So drafting charters, if you say, I want a charter that has these components, draft one up, it does it in a very, very short amount of time. So that's an awesome time saver. Or instant action plans. I want an instant action plan for this type of event or this type of response. AI goes and finds all the incident command system forms. It knows what positions are on the 203. You could tell it. You could just these people and it'll fill it out. It's a great time saver again, but we're not going to get caught in the forms. This is just a tool to help us once we've worked the process with somebody to do good planning. That's the key for all of this. The other

thing is searching lessons learned. So say you have a repository, you have this big document, you have whatever it is, and you've set up AI in your environment to be able to search your archives. And we'll talk about this. A key thing is to make sure you're working with your information technology department, your information security department on how and where and what you can do and can't do with your AI in your world. And so it can search through tons of data way faster than we can, and that's well worth the investment there.

So data heavy projects. So let's say we have those key performance indicators and we have all these data that we've measured. We've got like 40 time studies we did to see if it saved time. You can throw that in there, paste it in the AI tool, and it will automatically trend everything for you. You can get it to graph it.

It's pretty amazing. Excel formulas, I found this. I'm an Excel nerd. I use it a lot. It's very helpful to summarize data, to plan, to do a ton of stuff. We used it actually to track logistics orders once that we got on a big event,

international bike race. And so if you're stuck on a formula, you're not sure, you can say, I have these cells, the tabs called this, and it will write the formula for you. We can copy and paste it into the cell and it works. It's amazing. Forecasting resource usage. So the challenge with this is there is some manual to this, meaning we have to have this historical data on what resources have we used before,

how long did they work. But when we plug that in, kind of like the analyzing the KPI metrics, the AI can much more quickly than you or I can do, look at the trends, say, well, you may need this one in the future. You could plug all that data in and say, based on this, if I had another event,

but it was kind of this way, what would you say? And it does that amazingly quickly. So how do we measure this progress, right? To determine if it's helping or hindering the AI that is, we need to decide how to measure it. So let's start with defining what progress is, right? Is it just using AI more? Is it time saved by AI? Is it stakeholder satisfaction? Is it all of those? It can be all of them. Satisfaction is kind of a hard one to measure, but it's on a lot of KPIs that I've seen.

So let's get a baseline. So we're gonna measure it. Are we using it at all? How long does it take us to do these things? How happy are people now? Then we're gonna start using the tools. We're gonna consider, I've mentioned ChatGBT, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, there's others. Then start using them with guidelines, with IT, with your information security. That's critical. But get

in there. Get your folks, do a small group, have a small group of people use them at first. Then after we've used them for a while, 30, 60, 90 days, however, now we're going to measure them with AI. Did we save time? Are people more happy? Just how much are we using AI across the board? This is good data to have, right? So now we have all this data, we want to summarize it and share it and talk about it, and this is a quick way to do it, right? Throw it in the chart and AI will do this for you. Again, if you're tracking this and there is some work we have to do here, obviously. AI is the tool that's going to automate some stuff, but not everything. And so taking all this data, seeing how it worked for people or didn't,

this can help our overall department strategy on where we're going to go next with this. Are we going to do community risk reduction and use AI for predictive modeling? Are we going to help AI formulate our portfolio of projects, technology projects that are coming up? But based on this data, how we measure progress, how we see we're doing, we're gonna decide we're gonna go forward, we're gonna budget the money, or we're not, right?

So what did we learn today? Before we implement anything, we need to focus on the people, right? The people have to be ready, and we have to give them the knowledge to be ready to adopt this new tool. We have to determine what the process is. How does it fit? What are the guidelines?

When can we use it? When can we not use it? And then progress, we need to measure what we're doing or we've just kind of done it and we have no idea. It's kind of like not doing an after action report after a critical incident or an event. What are we gonna learn from it? Or how are we gonna get better if we don't measure it and talk about it and

plan towards it? So thank you all very much for watching this video. Pretty short one. You can listen to the People Process Progress podcast on Apple, Spotify, and more or watch it on YouTube like you are right now. There's more at peopleprocessprogress.com. There are some tools and templates. You can buy the book through there. There's a free field guide there that just has the tools of the seven pillars on how you can take ownership, better practice mindfulness, get more movement, set those boundaries, make connections, improve your sleep, and have faith. And that's a key component of us being a well-rounded responder or project manager. There are also other resources and write-ups and links to the podcast that have to do with

project management, public safety planning, look through that archive. You can follow me, Kevin Pennell on X and Instagram, at PennellKG. You can go to the YouTube channel. I mentioned this, Pennellify Fit. So if you're looking to get more of your pillar three movement in there, then I highly suggest you do that. I do all kinds of workouts with weights, without them, body weight, yoga, all that kind of stuff.

And then read the book. It's very helpful and there will be a future book called The Pupil Process Progress of Project Management. So if you're looking to build your base in project management, maybe you're not there. Or maybe you already work in project management and you just wanna reinforce some of the skills or hear what I have to say, that book going to be coming out in the near future as well

Thank you all very much for watching this video. I hope it helps Like and subscribe, uh, leave me comments and let me know how you thought this went how you think you'll use ai How you won't use ai any questions or concerns you have i'm not an ai expert I'm more of an expert i'd say in how to get things done and AI is a topic and a tool that I use and so I think about how Can I help others implement this in the way that I have both either my personal professional life? Thank you all very much. Stay safe out there. Wash those hands. Godspeed