Incident Control Room, provides a state of the art, reliable and resilient mobile technology, known as ICR, to businesses with an incident and crisis management and business continuity requirement globally.
The ICR App, a powerful tool, is already used in over 70 percent of the Irish Fire and Rescue Services as well as in non-emergency services industries such as Education, Life Sciences, and Food and Beverage to name just a few.
When it comes to dealing with crisis, or crisis management, the team at Incident Control Room have produced their ‘Top 10’ workflow tips to support crisis management procedures.
Workflows, when done right can provide enormous support to your crisis management team when they are called to respond to an incident or a crisis.
Photo: Michael O’ Rourke Photography
Here are their Top Ten Workflow Tips
1. Think executive summary not “War and Peace”
Your crisis management team spend most of their time working on the business and not necessarily in the business, so when your preparing your workflows, keep it concise and to the point.
2. Make the workflow role specific
Each member of the team is expected to respond to crises as per plan. Build workflows that will support their decision-making and demonstrate compliance with the established plans.
3. K.I.S.S.
Before ICR, I used spreadsheets to create simple but effective workflows & checklists for the crisis management team to follow. I had 5/6 columns with numbered rows for each step that had to be completed. Simple to update and simple to follow. See 4 – 7 as to how I first developed my workflows.
4. Tell the person what needs to be done (“Column A”)
This is not a plan, this is a set of crisis management workflow that need to be completed. Use actionable language to support your crisis management team through different stages of the crisis i.e. Contact team on xxx-xxxx-xxx, Reference document xxx-xxxx-xxx, etc. Avoid asking questions, as this sometimes is confusing.
5. Tell the person what document(s) should be referenced (“Column B”)
and in particular where they can be located. Use a hyperlink, and expedite the process for them. Make the hyperlinks step dependent for better results during the crisis.
6. Tell the person what person(s), contractor(s), agencies etc. should be contacted (“Column C”)
and then include their number in the workflow. Make the contacts step dependent also.
7. Mark Complete (“Column E & F”)
use a checkbox and a column for date & time stamping the action as complete. A simple way of seeing who did what post incident and demonstrating due diligence of the crisis management team. If you use excel, then you can copy your crisis management workflows into one document, then filter on the date & time range to produce a chronological log of the crisis management teams decisions.
8. Make them accessible
Avoid paper-based systems, why you ask? Well, the very reason for starting ICR was to ensure teams had up to date plans and workflows available to them at all times. Utilise the cloud – there’s SharePoint, Google docs, Dropbox, and many more. Talk to IT and see what’s available. It goes without saying that you need to facilitate access to these documents from a mobile device also. By utilizing a cloud solution, this will also help you enormously when you need to update workflows across the organization.
9. Drill regularly
Like everything; ensure that you workflows are tested through crisis management simulations at least annually. Run your simulations using the new workflows, and get feedback from the crisis management team to enhance and improve the workflows.
10. Maintain and deploy
As documents are revised or there are changes in personnel, your crisis management team workflows will need to be updated (easy part), and then deployed across the organisation (not so easy part). Fortunately for you, we have developed a solution that not only develops workflows but also keeps them up to date across your entire organization.
