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Operational Details Matter: Things to Pay Attention to In an Emergency Operations Centre

They say that the devil is in the details. They also say that God is in the details. Whichever one is true, the main gist is correct: you’ve got to pay attention to the details if you want your emergency operations centre (EOC) to operate smoothly and effectively. You need to pay attention to details regarding:

• communication within the EOC
• shared situation awareness
• recordkeeping & documentation within the EOC
• communication with external agencies
• shift changes

An emergency operations centre is, by nature, a communication and coordination hub. That’s why it exists. Yet, I ask you how well people within your emergency operations centre really communicate with one another. Really, how well do they communicate? Do you know? Have you run exercises with people actually playing through scenarios in the EOC? If not, then you don’t really know how people will react and perform.

When I ran an exercise in the our EOC last month, we found that there needed to be more and better communication between our various sections: Operations, Planning, Logistics and Finance & Admin. We also needed better communication from the Incident Commander through to all the sections. In the debriefing that we conducted immediately after the exercise, participants brought forth several recommendations. We implemented a few of them, and to great effect.

The first is the use of a dashboard projected on the wall at the front of the EOC. During the exercise, we had used a Powerpoint presentation that kept cycling through multiple slides. There was an area map, there was a background/context slide, there was a Current Situation slide. However, it was wordy, repetitive, didn’t draw attention to new content, and some found it annoying to be cycling all day. We replaced it with a solution designed in-house (by yours truly!) using a database backend to collect and process information submitted by any and all stations in the EOC and using Excel to format and present at the front of the room. This solution made updates instantaneous and did not require a central person to modify the Powerpoint slides. It visually highlighted new content, and allowed information segmentation by sector and chronological organization.

During the exercise, information was shared pretty well within each section – primarily by bouncing emails through shared email accounts for each section – but there was little communication that enabled the entire EOC to remain aware of new developments and maintain a shared situation awareness.  The introduction and adoption of this distributed dashboard system improved the situation. With this dynamic dashboard, when any section saw something new happening, within seconds everyone in the room could see it. If someone stepped away for a few minutes or had been preoccupied with a task for a few minutes, all they had to do was look up at the dashboard and see what had developed since they last checked. Instant, efficient, and effective.

We also instituted regularly-scheduled EOC briefings from the Incident Commander or the Operations Chief. Many of the people in our EOC are office workers who are used to working quietly. They’re not all accustomed to actually talking to share information across desks or between sections. Yet, even with the dashboard on the wall, leaders need to ensure that everyone has a shared understanding of what’s happening, and what our plan is. An incident action plan is useless unless the people who have to carry it out in a coordinated fashion know what’s going on and what they need to do. By including scheduled verbal briefings by leaders to the entire EOC, situation awareness and coordination was improved in a visible and obvious manner.

During the exercise, we had also failed to properly document our actions. We did not maintain action logs at each station, so it would have been impossible to piece together what each station had done during the evolution of each scenario. That can be a minor hindrance in an exercise, but it can mean serious consequences if there is an investigation following an actual activation & response, whether that investigation is purely internal or conducted by external agencies. Along the same lines as the distributed dashboard, we implemented another Access database solution that enabled each station to quickly type in action or decision updates. The Access form would automatically timestamp each entry and add tags indicating which station and individual had made the entry. It was far faster than a handwritten log and far easier for the Finance & Admin section to pull out reports on the back-end than having each station use individual Excel or Word documents.

“Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war.”
-Karl von Clausewitz

While the action log itself still needs improvement, it’s a step in the right direction by making it easier and faster to maintain accurate documentation of decisions, communication, and actions – and also easier and faster to extract & organize that information.

Communication with external agencies is always thorny thanks to what can only be called “friction”. The notable German strategist von Clausewitz is remembered well for his statement that even the simplest things are difficult in war because little difficulties accumulate to produce maddeningly-disruptive friction that grinds one’s efforts to a halt. Simple communication with external agencies can be fraught with such friction. In our case, during our EOC activation, our regularly scheduled coordination teleconferences experienced the following issues:

• external agencies unsure which day the scheduled calls would begin, even though they had received information about the start date in advance
• a typo in distributed document, leading a number of people to call the wrong number on the first day
• teleconference system malfunction which resulted in multiple, independent teleconferences being merged into one free-for-all communication melee where no productive communication could take place
• unauthorized access to one of the teleconferences, leading to a number of subsequent changes in access numbers and even teleconference services

Plan for contingencies. Check and double-check. It’s tedious, it’s annoying, but it’s necessary. Yet, I’m willing to bet you still won’t catch all the little gremlins that lurk in the details when it comes to communication – even when it’s something as basic as teleconferences. These things may not even be under your control, but when they happen you need to be able to respond quickly – and you’ll respond most rapidly when you already have backup plans or backup measures in place.

No single shift can remain operational for multiple 24-hour periods. No decision-maker can remain sharp for multiple 24-hour periods, either. In fact, for sustained operations, you must have multiple shifts of personnel and leadership. We’re all human. Yet, change of shift introduces small challenges related to passing on sufficient information and context to subsequent shifts.

A single business continuity or emergency management exercise likely will not require shift changes unless you design them in because exercises seldom run for more than a day, and often for much less than a full day.  Yet, this oft-ignored element of EOC operations is critical to ensuring a smooth, effective response to whatever the situation happens to be. In our case, we ensured time overlap between shifts, developed information teplates to capture the information that subsequent shifts would require, and we had the dashboard at the front of the EOC showing the next shift recent information updates and currently-developing situations.

Running an emergency operations centre is not an easy thing. You need to ensure that you have the right people, the right tools, the right structure and processes, but you also need to pay attention to the little details that enable all of those resources to function the way you envision. Pay attention to the details. Pay attention to the details. Pay attention to the details.