The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - The Incident Command System Works for All Things | Foundations Friday #93

Episode Date: May 5, 2023

Sharing how both the principles and documents from the Incident Command System work when planning projects, programs, or other events.

The Incident Command System works for all things. Why am I saying this, you may ask? Because I've seen in both my public safety, emergency management, public health, and project and program management experience, I've seen it work because I've used it. And there are some similarities, some differences between those different worlds, but vastly, as I've talked about before, getting people together, having a common process, right? Does foundation apply to things? We know leaders' intent.

We have objectives. We have an org structure. We're going to get some resources, people, stuff, things, and we're going to communicate. It's just different ways to capture the same information. And this came up in my mind again as I think a helpful episode, and hopefully you all do too, because I used it, right? I've used it to find missing people. I've used it to take care of urban configurations,

huge planned events like presidential level things and national level sporting events. And I've used it to deploy a bunch of devices for a COVID surge, and I've used it to help open a whole new hospital. And what it does, the process, there's foundational five of the planning process, the planning P, that's very similar, whether it's projects or incident management, is it brings people together, it has them talk to each other, and then the forms, the incident command system forms, are just an outstanding tried and true method to document what are the objectives, who's in what

position, how do we contact each other, where do your teams report, what is the org structure of this event or incident? How will the project communicate? What are links to resources? Every incident command system form I can equate to a project or a program coordinating function. And did that successfully recently and was very happy with it, and it communicated well to others. It's the bottom line up front that you need, right, especially that 204, which is the work assignment form, which is here's what this is for, here's what team or group or division, whichever it's for, the date and times.

And then it just goes, okay, who's in charge of this overall section? Who do we need to contact at the top? And then goes by what's the team, right, which is a strike team, which is the same kind of resources, or what is the task force, which is mixed resources. So you could have a computer person, a network person, and a server person, or an electronic health record person, and that's a task force, all these different skills that work together, and then on down the line, right, and then it says who's their leader, who's their point of contact, who do we go to for decisions for that team or escalations. And then it says how do we contact them and where are they going to report,

where is their team going to be when they show up in their kind of staging area, right, or their reporting location. And then at the bottom, some other pertinent information, like here's other communication, you know, chat links, Zoom lines, direct phone calls, that kind of stuff. And I just, I'm really glad that I learned how to, one, I learned how to do from the bottom up incident command system stuff, incident management stuff, from checking people in with a notebook to coordinating an entire planning section, you know, and helping pull together whole events, because

it builds you up to then be able to handle any kind of thing you can think of down the road, whether it's a technology thing, a healthcare thing, a sporting event thing, a public safety thing. If you get these skills, these are lifelong skills in incident management and the incident command system and the concepts. And so I encourage everyone that's in public safety, public health, mostly government entities or kind of similar government entities, use the incident command system more. But if you use it and you're on the front lines and you're looking at career advancement, you're looking at ways to just be better at what you do and make lieutenant or captain or, you know,

going to be in charge of people, go to those incident command system classes, not just the low-level required ones, go to the higher-level ones. Then go to the incident management classes where you do that week-long 305 incident management kind of boot camp where you work with people you don't know in positions you haven't done before, get a feel for what you want to do, working a planning process, not being the tactical person on the street but rather being a little more strategic and how do I organize this whole response and how do I let go of what I would do if I'm not in charge of, say,

operations, but rather how do I go to the subject matter experts and have them help me build the plan? And that's really, I think, the value of what I've carried with me throughout my career is you learn very quickly all the sections, even the incident commander, are there to work to support operations. Those are the boots on the ground. There's safety, security, wellness, everything we need to look out for, is that I'm going to let the operations folks, the experts, and let's say if we're talking about IT where I work now, networking, field service that takes care of computers, infrastructure folks like wiring and cabling, server folks, electronic medical record,

they're going to tell me what we need, and I'm going to help pull it together and identify gaps for sure, but I'm not going to give my two cents even though I have some experience in each of those areas. They're the pros. They're the ones that have the teams that are going to solve these problems. And so when you learn the incident command system and then incident management more and more, you learn how to pull that information and pull it together. Just like if you're an associate project manager and you're just starting out in project management, you'll learn how to do that, right? You'll learn how to facilitate meetings, how to get deliverables from folks, and then you're the project manager,

and then you're in charge of the whole shebang, right? How do we map out everything we need early on? What are the resources? Then how do we ask those resources? Okay, how long will this take? What do we need? What kind of space? What kind of equipment? You know, what specs do we need from the vendor? And then when you're a senior project manager, you're helping other project managers and associates pull their stuff together, maybe in a program. And then, of course, when you're a program manager, you're leading and helping and supporting groups of project managers who have their own projects or even their own a program. And then, of course, when you're a program manager, you're leading and helping and supporting groups of project managers who have their own projects or even their

own programs, like I've talked about on a previous episode here, programs of programs. And so that all carries over, and you can't try and be the problem solver at every level because you won't have the bandwidth and you won't do a good job at leading if you're in the weeds constantly. And so that incident command system concept, the leadership principles I've talked about on here, the planning principles, the facilitation carry directly over to what I do now, what I've done for the past kind of five and a half years proper in healthcare IT. And so for those of you, again, that are in public safety or areas where incident command training is an option, I highly encourage you to do it.

It will help with things around the station, around your department, let alone if you're involved in a big event or incident. And it will carry on should you get out of public safety one day and transfer to project or program management. It will make a huge difference. If you've got questions about transitioning from public safety, feel free to e-mail me. It's kpanellproductions at keptalkspod.com or leave a comment on keptalkspod.com. Happy to get back to you and, again, follow on social media on Instagram and Twitter.

I'm at panell, P-A-N-N-E-L-L-K-G. I've got a Facebook page for the Keptalks podcast and the AtPanel5Fit YouTube channel, which is where we creep it up on 210,000 views, which is cool, 15 seconds at a time. It's pretty much all shorts, just sharing my workouts, giving you some ideas. I'm getting ideas from you all, so thanks so much for that. Remember, when you're leading teams, when you're using whether it's incident command system concepts or project and program management, we've got to have a plan, and that plan comes together through a coordinated process together.

We've got to use facts and data and expert opinions, not just, you know, rumors and fear to drive what we do. We need to get involved. We've got to get involved strategically first, right, leading our teams, and then sometimes taking a deeper look to see how our teams are doing, what they need, right, to make a difference in this world. Thank you all for making a difference by listening and subscribing to the show. And I wish you all Godspeed.