Incident Management System: A simple, scalable

A TEMPLATE FOR SITUATIONAL AWARENESS Standardized Crisis Response through the Incident Management System

By Simone Skopek

PROPERTY AND FACILITY managers who face a natural, man-made or multicausal crisis have a duty to: 1) keep their staff and occupants safe; 2) protect the real estate assets they manage; and 3) resume business quickly. In organizations with large portfolios, there is the added challenge of managing centralized activities, including coordinating the emergency response throughout the organization and addressing the urgent needs in business areas such as human resources.

For any large organization to manage a crisis, there are two fundamental requirements. First, there must be accurate and timely situational awareness regarding all the critical areas. This information must find its way up the chain of command to those in authority — i.e. senior management who need this information to make informed decisions.

From there, the second fundamental requirement is that senior management relays clear directives to all workers in the field. The importance of situational awareness going up to the nerve centre of the organization and clear directives coming down and across the organization cannot be overemphasized.

Unfortunately, “bottom-up meets topdown” communications can be confusing unless there are clear channels that do not cross one another, and which contain communications from the people who have the right information and the authority to act. For example, problems can arise if every employee is allowed to use their own best judgement to determine to whom they will distribute an e-mail.

With a lot of information flying around, people become overloaded. As they scramble to sort out exactly what is happening and who is doing what, situational awareness and directives may be confusing, even contradictory, and/or important messages can be overlooked.

The Incident Management System (IMS) is a universal system of communications to facilitate situational awareness and directives, which is used by emergency management professionals all over the world. It can be applied to almost any type of organization, including those that oversee large real estate portfolios.

The globally accepted unified Incident Management System was developed out of the need for government and nongovernment resources to work together to tackle large-scale incidents. It arose in the early 1970s when devastating wildfires in southern California destroyed vast areas of forest, killed eight people and cost more than $18 million per day in total expenses and damage.

Many services, both private and public at all levels of government, were involved in

tackling the fires. This created an impetus for the development of a national interagency management system, spawning the Incident Management System. It is based on community command and control procedures developed by the military. It is simple, scalable and flexible, and offers an effective way to harmonize response to a multi-faceted crisis.

CONSISTENT KEY FUNCTIONS For property and facility management organizations, IMS offers a standardized approach to emergency management, encompassing: personnel; facilities; equipment; procedures; and communications within a real estate organizational structure.

It is predicated on the understanding that in any and every incident, simple or complex, there are certain crisis management functions that must be carried out regardless of the number of people who are available or involved in the emergency response.

In a simple incident, all of these hats could be worn by the same person. However, with more complex events — such as the COVID-19 pandemic — which may persist for months over a wide geographic area, coordination of vast resources from within the organization and external to it may be required.

IMS offers an internal structure that integrates the activities of people involved in three areas:

1. those who manage the corporate functional areas that are generally centralized such as human resources, finance and legal: 2. those who are responsible for facilitating and setting policies for continuity of service lines to clients, such as facility management, engineering, health and safety, and procurement; and 3. the “boots on the ground” property and facility managers.

A well-oiled IMS will inform the business continuity plans and result in seamless and harmonized playbooks for each functional area, service line and building. The result is that everyone should be clear about their role, their designated communication pathways and accountability.

Because it is a standardized, modular approach, this makes it flexible and adaptable so that the response can be quickly expanded or contracted according to changing circumstances and needs. It also provides harmonized protocols for serving clients and occupants, and for working together with responders from different jurisdictions and disciplines.

Those are both internal and external, including local first responders, mayors, provincial operations centres, and federal agencies including army units. Because it is a simple approach, it can be adopted relatively easily.

The fundamental crisis management tasks in the Incident Management System are: Command (1 person and an alternate) Command Support (1 person and an alternate for each area as needed to advise Command, for example: • Emergency information such as news, weather, industry information etc.

• Human resources

• Health & Safety: Maintains HSSE

Emergency procedures for all accounts/ sites for reference and inclusion in property/site Emergency Response Plans • Communications: Manage internal and external communications • Legal: Provide documentation for client pre-authorizations and vendor preapprovals, and monitor government regulations • Finance: Manage the processes for emergency spending, personnel expenses, client reimbursable costs, and emergency response revenue generated • Business information: Provide data for people and sites including location and contact information • GIS: Map people and site locations • Procurement: Manage vendor partnerships and emergency readiness

Separate from Incident Command, the key roles of planning, operations, logistics and finance/administration must be covered. Depending on the complexity of the incident, the tasks within each of these critical areas may be few and simple, requiring the engagement of just one or two people to do all the tasks, or they may be complex and involve many people.

UNIFIED INCIDENT COMMAND In some emergencies, multiple organizations must work together and/or coordinate their responses. For example, in some situations, firefighters and police may each have their roles. This requires proper channels of communication between the commander of each organization in order to effectively share the management of the incident.

In this case, the incident may require decision-making to come from more than one organization or jurisdiction. A unified command is an authority structure in which the role of incident command is shared by two or more individuals, each already having authority in a different responding organization or agency. Once joint decisions have been made, generally one member is identified to speak for the unified command team.

Once each organization has received directives from their respective Incident Commander, then they may need to collaborate with their counterparts in order to operationalize the directives. This may require significant interaction on the ground — for example, to finesse their plans (plans), mobilize material (logistics), deploy (operations), and make financial arrangements (finance and administration).

Although each organization is unique, the IMS approach can be adapted to address most types of emergencies thanks to its simplicity, scalability and ease of implementation. zz Simone Skopek is a sustainability and facilities management consultant, and author of two books about the green workplace.

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