The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - Setting Up and Leading an Efficient All-Hazards Documentation Unit | BTS #39

Episode Date: October 8, 2019

Documents aren't sexy, but they're critical to keep in order and archived. "If it isn't documented, it didn't happen"

Please silence your cell phones, hold all sidebar conversations to a minimum, and we'll get started with Between the Slides in three, two, one. Hello, Between the Slides listeners. Thank you for coming back. In this episode, we're going to focus on a less popular, I guess I will say, but critically important unit in the planning section, and that is the documentation unit. As I like to call it, the stepchild of the plan section. So the documentation unit is sometimes overlooked, not stood up as it could be or should be,

and in the era of Charlottesville or Missouri, all these big civil unrest or the aftermath, if there's an incident management component at all to any of these mass shootings or other big events, hurricanes in Puerto Rico. And a great saying from healthcare and probably in the legal community, but from what I know in healthcare is if you didn't document it, it didn't happen, right? So the documentation unit is critical for any special event, whether something goes wrong or not, and certainly some incident response to help document what has happened, what should have happened, what did or didn't happen. And it can show gaps, it can show strengths. And so the

documentation unit needs to be taken seriously. If you're a planning chief out there, make sure that either you're covering it or you get staffed up to cover it. I'll go over some details. And how I'm going to do that is we're going to walk through the All Hazard Incident Management Teams Association Interstate Incident Management Team Qualification System Taskbook. That's the one that we're going to use. That's the one that I've seen adopted most by All Hazard Incident Management Teams in recent years. There are different versions. There's wildlife, wildland versions. There's previous L-hazard ones. This is one is what we'll cover. And I'm just going to cover the documentation unit specific portions. The rest of this task book is general competencies for units in the planning section, like leadership and communication and basic things. And I'm not

going to go over that in this episode. We're going to focus specifically on some practical ways that I have or my colleagues and I have applied the task book tasks in the real world. So as we get started, focus on the tasks for the Documentation Unit Leader book, the specific stuff, let's first review what it means. There's some definition for codes that you see in a task book. So there's I1, I2, 01, 02, and R. So I1 means that this task must be performed on an incident, which means you're not gonna get approved credentials

unless you've done an action, done a task, on a real incident, right? That, like what Rob and I talked about in 37A, of something happens, you've gotta figure out, it's gonna be messy, that's fine, but that happens, you've got to figure out, it's going to be messy, that's fine, but that's how you're going to get signed off. And sometimes that's the best way, may not feel like it at the time, but that's the best way to get experience. And it's the only way to know if someone can do the job for real when they're under stress, when they don't have all

the answers starting out. I2 is that it could be an incident or an incident within an event. So if you have a planned event but something happens like a car comes on the course of a bicycle race and you help manage that or you have an incident within the incident, typically we refer to that a lot when our people get hurt or something, say there's a fire in a building that's in the course of the marathon, something like that, so it's affecting your incident. in a building that's in the course of the marathon, something like that, so it's affecting your incident. So not just an incident, but maybe something a little more planned or something else happens within it. And then for 01 and 02, so those are planned events. Those are big exercises.

So in that Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program, or HSEAP, you could have someone that signed off on these for a planned event or a big exercise, full scale or functional. So full scale means you're testing everything. You've got all the players there. You've got all the equipment. You're using communications. Functionally, you're maybe not using every component. You're testing a certain function. How fast can we give out water to people, right? But you may not be testing all the reasons why. How are we also doing infrastructure and damage assessment? Everything else all kind of combined together. O2 is that, and there's a little more notes in the task book you could read, I'm just covering

kind of the high level, is that it could be a planned event that doesn't kind of meet the O1 requirements and exercise or training your day job. There's some stuff that's directly transferable. In events that I've been in, I've been part of, we've had a technology section. So if you're an information technology director, you do that every day, you're probably pretty comfortable doing the same thing just in a different facility. You still know infrastructure, you still know networking,

you still know desktop computers. So if you already know how to do that, then you can be signed off on some actions or knowledge or competencies that are already in that. And then there's an R, which is rare event. So a rare event is like an accident, an injury, a vehicle, aircraft crash, things that don't happen a lot. So similar to that kind of incident within the event,

but maybe it's for kind of a smaller group. It's not a big incident. It's one person that was injured or something like that or things like that. So when we go through this task book, I will make sure to include how they qualify. And really from the get-go, let's just say that almost all of the tasks for the documentation unit leader that can be signed off can be done at an incident or a planned event. That's just flat out. The only one that has an additional one is duplication equipment is operational, which is the last thing we'll cover, which just means that if in your day job you're familiar with making sure the copier works and that kind of stuff, then you're good to go. Other than that, every documentation unit leader specific tasks that you can be assessed on,

signed off on credentialed in can be done whether it's an incident or an event. Typically it's very important to collect documents when you can for incidents, but typically for a planned events, then it's, it's, it's kind of more realistic that that's when that happens. So before we get into this specifics, let me just give you some reminders. If you want to catch up on some other planning section specific episodes from between the slides, episode 17 is my coverage of the resource unit leader and its importance and what you do as a resource unit leader. Episode 21 covers the planning section chief course

and some tips on being successful in the course and in reality. Episode 28 was the first interview and discussion I had with my pal Rob Rowley, fire captain, and where he really discusses a lot of situation unit stuff. So that covers a lot of the other. The only unit we haven't broken down yet is the demobilization unit. So check those out. That will give you kind of a more overall planning section view. So let's get into some documentation competency. So the first thing is the behavior is, and that's kind of how it's broken down, is to ensure documentation is complete. And so the

first thing in this documentation unit specific is to prepare and maintain an index of incident files. What this means is both electronically, as you're working throughout the incident or event, and in hard copy, you need to have an index of what forms are where, how you're sharing documentation, set all that kind of stuff up. Most folks that are probably listening to this are familiar with Dropbox, Google Docs. There's other online systems. I don't endorse any one or the other. I've used Dropbox probably more. But a way to have folks save files in one place where you as the documentation unit leader,

whose job it is to manage and secure and package and tally all the documentation for an incident or event can both from start to finish when you've stood up, hey everyone, start saving your files here, whether it's a draft, instant action plan forms, contingency plans, back to the end to say, okay, I'm now gonna go print all this stuff out and put it in a package and box it up, which we'll talk about in a little bit.

To the hard copy stuff, so do you have the air quote doc box, so literally the top to a box of paper or an actual, you know, what reams of paper come in and writing dock box and putting, put all these forms here and having those spread around, you need to think about how you're gonna have that. Do you have supplies to have cardboard boxes that hanging files can go in?

So when you get into packaging and handing that documentation over, because remember as incident management practitioners, we don't own the incident or event. We're there to help support the folks that do. So we are going to give this documentation to them and we'll get into, we are going to keep some copies for ourselves and our teams and our agencies, but primarily this package is almost like a big kind of legal package and in some cases it has been.

So that's very important. And with this, an additional aspect of this is needing to know the agency, the locality, the kind of national standards like for archives and records administration. What's the retention policy? How long do you have to keep incident action plans or this kind of document or this kind of document if you use it for reference, whether it's in the plan, whether it's part of the planning process. What are the collection locations? Great person to pair up with is the resource unit leader who's going to be establishing check-in locations and working with logistics there. You need to know when are you going to ask folks to drop off their forms on the way out

or on the way in and how's that going to work. Another thing you have to be familiar with as a documentation unit leader is security of documents, classifications, declassifications. And in the all hazards world, typically that's like law enforcement sensitive. When you get into Department of Defense and you get into classified, secret, top secret, you could have confidential, all these different things. And just know that, and I think we've talked about this in other episodes, there's sometimes a law enforcement sensitive version of the incident action plan, which means it's got where our undercovers or where our spotters or things are going to be. And then there's a for everybody else that doesn't have all that stuff in there, or maybe not every

law enforcement officer's name. So how are you going to, how are we going to parse that out and make sure that you're keeping track of which documents, which files go where, and that you maintain that classification. And if you're not trained up in that, then, you know, work with there's training out there for that work with your law enforcement folks. They're probably the best conduit from the all hazards world. If you partner with the National Guard or the military because of the locality you're in, certainly work very closely with them. There's experts in all of your partners and with those. So that's kind of the first thing.

And it's really getting squared away and getting settled and knowing how to manage the information that you are going to be exposed to. So the second thing is, does the electronic storage meet legal and security and archival documents? So very much like project management, did we consult compliance and legal and IT security, information security? You should do that as a documentation leader, absolutely. So if you have an IT section stood up, or if you have an IT technical expert, talk to them about what are the rules on our network. When I go out, even if I'm representing this regional team or local team and I'm not on my home network, what are the rules for retaining things?

Can I use a USB drive on my computer or is that a no-no? Do I have to use an encrypted one? You need to figure all that stuff out. Talk to your legal department, law enforcement. Again, law enforcement in everyday life, let alone incident management, is very connected to the legal system. So they are a great conduit to get some more information about how you need to store and what the requirements. The other thing which is good in here that it states clearly too is what does the agency administrator want you to do? Do they say you're going to store everything in my safe, in our cabinets, whatever. You're also

going to use our file system electronically. We'll get you set up here or there. And if that's the case, that actually takes some of the work off your plate. But you need to know that so that everyone on the event knows that or on the incident knows it and that all the information, all the documents go there. Third thing on the list is to maintain, safeguard, and securely store incident records. We kind of touched on that. Is there a storage room you can use where you can just put all the stuff in there if you have a multi-day event or incident? Do you have boxes that can secure, that can lock themselves, hanging file folder, metal things? Do you have forms or do you know the chain of custody for all the documents that you're using during the event or incident afterwards? So think about those kinds of things so that we have a record. And again,

some planned events have incidents that happen in them and it becomes a legal case, right? And in this day and age with, you know, it's pretty litigious society. So make sure you cover your bases by documenting and keeping your documentation, and during the event or the incident, keep that documentation safe. The fourth thing is delivering a final documentation package to the designated person, so the agency administrator or whoever they say, maybe they have their own, you know, administrative lead in the locality or for the event, is that you have a nice professional looking package. Again, we've talked about your incident action plan represents the professionalism of your team from cover through the entire content and the quality of it. Certainly this package does

as well. I've done a decent job as a documentation unit leader. I've seen an outstanding example from one of our team leads that did that for a major incident and it just looked great. It looked like what you see in the movies or the TV show when they bring those hanging file folder boxes and they put them on the desk for legal case and the review. It was great, put together well so you could follow it. It was by form number, by day, really well thought of. Some things to consider here is do you have a copy for your team right if

that's okay depending on security and things like that it's always good to also have a copy just like any other kind of legal document which a lot of these are where they are really do you have a copy for the host for sure do you have a copy for the sponsoring agency local state or federal so if you're a an asset to your locality of the state or the federal government you're traveling around, do they want a copy of the forms you've filled out at least or the entire package or the incident action plan? So have those discussions, work that stuff out so you can know that ahead of time. The second section of the competency is to ensure

completion of assigned actions to meet identified objectives. That's so vague, right? So let's get into the specifics. And some of that like this or other job compet That's so vague, right? So let's get into the specifics. And some of that like this or other job competencies are like that, aren't they? They kind of speak to that, like be competent, meet the objectives. So specifically this section, this number five, is to ensure the maintenance agreements

for the equipment are met, right? So think about how practical that is. So there are copier services. Let's say you have these huge copiers. You're fortunate to have that whether your team owns them or you're at a facility like a school or a business and that's where you're operating from. Then all of a sudden they start running out of ink or they... Gosh, what is that? The thing that burns the image in, whatever it is.

I used to repair those things too. I can't remember. But at any rate, so they start going bad, right? And so do you have a contract to call a copy service to come fix it quickly? Do you have your own supplies? Do you have your own experts on your team? If not, consider that before you go out the door. That's part of that kind of, if it's an incident working up the P and you're the doc leader, do I have all these things in place? And certainly if it's an incident working up the P and you're the doc leader, do I have all these things in place? And certainly if it's an event where you have time, then you need to think about that kind of stuff. Do you have a contract or access to a division department's repro graphics? So the folks that are going to make you hundreds of copies of the incident action plan for the 1,300 folks you have where each of their group supervisors gets a copy and other folks

need fancy copies and all that kind of stuff is how are you going to mass distribute hard copies of an instant action plan? I'm sure there are teams and I don't know of it. And if you're listening to this, and you want to want to hit me up at kp.bts.podcast at gmail.com, or just go to between the slides.com and send me a message. Um, we're still printing out IEPs, instant action plans, and that's good. I actually like hard copies books, let alone plans. Um, I'm sure in some day and age there's going to be, and we've done this where folks can scan a QR code and look at it on their smartphone. So if you have a regular phone, you know, whether it's the big ones, the Samsung or the Apple or another one, or a pad, we're not fully

in the age of, hey, we shot this to everybody's iPad or tablet or whatever, and now you just have it. We're still going to have to make those copies. Also, a holdover that some folks still need and want is do we have redundant communication in the form of a fax machine? So what if there's someone somewhere, all our access is down, but we have an analog phone line, we have this old fax machine, and we can fax copies of this to somebody somewhere. Do we have that as a backup? And that's just kind of like good preparedness, like we would do at home, trying to find a, you know, having a regular phone line. So when cell phone stuff goes out, but, you know, fax machines still exist. Some folks still use them pretty regularly. for sure need to

capture regularly, the timeframes of them, the pertinent submissions, et cetera. Now, there's way more forms that I'm going to talk about, but these are the ones that I've seen for sure we have interest in that will show who was there, what actions did people take or not take, how did we make sure people got home safely, all that kind of stuff. The first big one is the full incident action plan. We absolutely need to have a clean, crisp copy of that or one that we as the documentation unit leader, because as an example, if we're doing the operations period briefing and there's a change, we are the ones with the master copy with the red ink writing the change in so that we can change that or at least know it in the incident command posts. Nobody else's, that's

our gig. So we need to for sure have a copy of the full incident action plan. Absolutely. And it can be, you know, we'll talk on this a little bit, one of the fancy bound ones, or just a black and white one or whatever, we need to have the full thing. Another form that's really important is the incident command system 211, the check-in form. So that's what the status check-in recorders are going to be using that are part of the resource unit. That will help us see when folks showed up, how long were they working, where did they report to, did we get them all their equipment. So that's going to give us the picture, and again, take your mind as the documentation

unit leader to building a legal case or defense or however you want to scale that, that this is going to show us the accountability and that we did track folks and we did monitor them, we did give them safety equipment, et cetera, et cetera. The 213, the message form, we wanna look at message traffic. And again, this is an old school in the day of text messaging and instant messaging and email and face-to-face or radio or whatever.

We still are gonna use written messages, these 213s, to pass official requests, notes, documentation between sections. So we need to try the best of our ability and capture that message traffic because we can kind of recreate, just like a case, communication that did or didn't happen around certain events or incidents. The Incident Command System 214, the activity log, that's probably one of the most important that's going to show, again, good

interactions, bad interactions, decisions that were made, arguments that were had, people that were dismissed. It's really, this is the closest thing to me as like a legal pad kind of description of how people's day or shift was. The next form is the 221, the demobilization. So this is kind of the opposite end of the 211. So this is us making sure folks left, they gave us their stuff back. They did or didn't have enough rest. So if we see, you know, someone's work rest ratio, as they were just working and working, and they've only had two hours of sleep, we don't put them on the road to drive 10 hours. So this is another kind of closure of our resources, safety, our people safety our people right so to me the big ones are

the full ip the check-in form the 211 the messages 213s the activity log 214s and demode 221s there are resource requests there are you know lots of other things uh forms but to me this this is how we can for sure capture what we did or didn't plan for what happened in the incident or the event and help recreate things if we need to. And even for after action reports, even if it never goes to a legal anything, this can help us do better next time, which there's always opportunity for that. Number seven, priorities for duplication with the planning section and the timeframe. So we need to sync up when we are going to make the copies to have enough time to get them everywhere they need to go to have enough

time to do the briefing. Right. So a good system that's worked for me and for others was to have, as we're preparing edits for the next operational period, well before is to have the resource unit leader, the documentation unit leader, the GIS specialist, if you're tracking resources, and maybe someone from information technology who's going to pull all that together, the tech stuff, but you as the documentation unit leader are validating with resource the kind and type of resources, did anything change, and we're going to review and prep the final draft of the incident action plan. And then as we're changing resources, before we do that to type it in there, we will have had a resource would have had hopefully a review and

approval from operations of any resource changes, whether they didn't need as many, they asked for some more. So tomorrow is going to be a little different. And then when we've all put that together on the actual documents for the incident action plan, we're going to give that to our plan chief who's going to have final review to say, okay, we're going to give that to our plan chief who's going to have final review to say, okay, this is ready then to go to the incident commander and approve it for signature. It's very similar to substitute plans

for each chief for project manager and instant action plan for charter. And it's like us giving that to our sponsor, our executive that's going to sign off and say, yep, that's your marching orders. That's what we're going to ask people to do. So in this case, plans should always have the last eyes on it. And it's hard. Part of me says, you know what, just trust your folks and let it happen. The other thing is for events or incidents, you need to just make sure it's always good to get

a second set of eyes. We've all been tired. We've all missed crossing T's and dotting I's and all that good stuff. So it's good to have another set of I's that's fresh that hasn't been in the document the whole time and may miss something or may see something that we've missed. Certainly we want it to be the best it can be before the incident commander looks at it and signs off. And to that backwards plan, so if we know when does the next operational period start and when is the next operational period briefing to our people? Then we need to make sure we've built in a buffer as the documentation unit leader to get all the documents printed,

distributed and ready to go so that when we do our briefing, where if we have more than one site or many sites and we're briefing over the radio and in person that when I say on page seven, we're going to look at work assignment, whatever, everybody can look at it at the same time. So it's like doing a presentation, but not having the ability to actually share your screen, where you're just going to walk people through the document you know they have, and you're going to reference the page. So the documentation unit leader's job is to make sure that those pages are in people's hands on time

So number eight we are going to provide duplication and collation services so we talked about some of that with the rubric graphics department Other things to consider is do we need copies for VIPs meaning I've seen some great ones specifically with the debate big big national level stuff where it was plastic on the front cover, bound booklet. It's a fantastic looking action plan. And then we also have the kind of handout version, black and white for folks in the field where it fits in their pocket. So you need to plan for what kind of things are you going to print? What's the cost of that? How long is it going to take for each one of those? And then are are we going to do handout size because you got to be able to format that a little bit different if you're not familiar with that get used to and look at how you format things in word or whatever program you're using but word primarily and how you can make big ones small ones

and are you going to when you get an it's an action plan particularly for a really big event multi-day lots of resources Not every boot on the ground needs the entire incident action plan. And this has been discussed many times in many places. I'm sure if you're listening to this and you're an incident management practitioner, you've heard the same thing, that some ops folks will just rip out their 204, their assignments, and that's all they care about. It is good for them to see the objectives. It is great, absolutely, for them to see safety messages and other things. If you're going to print just an ops packet, you also got to plan for that, which means you're just going to do work assignments so you can kind of minimize what they

have to carry with them. And you're just going to have to play that by ear and have the discussions with your team. Next, we're going to do with number nine in this task book, specific doc unit leader. We're going to have to number nine in this task book, specific doc unit leader. We're going to have to provide the instant action plan or other relevant plan duplication. We see a lot of duplication, collation, printing, all that kind of stuff. We are definitely the kinkos of the team. We're going to have to work really closely with the resource unit leader and plan chief to know how many do we need where, which we kind of touched on how often.

Get them to the locations. Make some extra copies because someone may show up, a visitor who wasn't planning on a VIP or not. And it's always good to have an extra. You can just give them. Some folks are going to take more. Some folks are going to lose them. So it's just like everyday life. You got to build some contingencies in your documentation.

Guard the fancy copies of the incident action plan. And a nice color bound incident action plan for significant event that's high profile or even incident is very attractive as a memento. It's very attractive for anybody that walks in the room. But we printed those for a reason because those are for the leaders we want to give them to, to make a good impression. It's easier to read, it stands out, it shows the good work of everyone involved. So don't just leave those out. Have your special box wherever you're gonna put it, lock it up, hide it in your stuff, whatever.

But don't just leave those out laying with everything else. So number 10, what we wanna consider in the document leader task is produce the final documentation package. So we're getting now to the end of the event, end of the incident, it's time. We're preparing to hand this off and we're to head home. I would suggest that you organize these in a practical manner for non-incident command system folks, right? If you organize it for me, according to sections or

command staff or units or groups, I'm going to understand that because I've been trained in it and I have experience in it. If you do that for folks that you want to help who have no idea what the heck you're talking about, it's just going to be gobbledygook that you've put in a folder that works for you, not them. So think about doing it by the event title and date or date, operational period, something that makes sense where clearly they can go, let's see what happened to this marathon day on this day, day one, day two, day three, stage, whatever, and organize it like that. Make sure that it's well organized, labeled. You're going to have to put some money into the administrative costs of your unit. We've talked about that in other episodes for sure. One of the things you do

as a unit leader is you lead a unit, which includes supplies for the work you're going to need for your people, for the work you're going to need to get done. So that includes files, file labels, markers, hanging folders, all the stuff you can think of to organize a bunch of documents. And the last thing in this unit is to ensure that your duplication equipment is operational. We kind of mentioned that earlier. So that's like any deployment, whether you're a firefighter, EMT, nurse, business person that's going to present is check your equipment before you have to use it. So test it. How fast does it make copies? How efficient is it? I was on a big event and a buddy of mine, actually Mike Schnatter, who was on episode seven,

talking about law enforcement. He and I were working. He was plans. I was doing documentation at Unilever Axtra and we had a request to make a bunch of copies late at night. Cool. No problem. We have access to that. And one of the machines was great. One of the machines was one of the slowest copiers and it was huge, but it was unbelievably slow. So hindsight for me is to test that, right? And learn my lesson and look for something else. And so when you're scoping out where you're gonna set up your documentation unit or the facilities you have or the equipment, is test that and see how long it takes to print things.

Print something big once and kind of note the time. And then you'll know when someone asks or just practically, hey, yeah, that's gonna take over an hour or yeah, this is super fast, it'll be like 10 minutes. So some practical tips there. I hope if you're going down this road of getting credentials as a documentation unit leader, and really if you're

working through the plan section, or if you're just trying to get trained, cross-trained a little bit of everything in incident management, get these unit leader books signed off. Do the work because it will make you a much better section chief for sure. Because you will, at the ground level up, like any other job, know how to be a better unit leader so you can help mentor folks, you can help enable their success if you are the plan chief. And if you're the only person, you're the plan chief, plus all the unit leaders. So it'll help you shore up any gaps that you might have. So I hope this was helpful.

Wish you all the best. Stay safe. Thank you so much for helpful. I wish you all the best. Stay safe. Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate everybody's time. Betweenthesides.com. I've got links to all the socials and things. Penel KG on Twitter. We have a Facebook page as well. So thank you all very much. Godspeed.