Project management is not a new idea.  As long as things have needed to get done, people have needed to come up with a plan for how to do them.  There are few things worse than having something that needs to get done and not knowing who is supposed to be working on it or what the steps are in getting it done.  To get started with project management, you don't need any special skill sets or certain software (however there are many tools out there that can assist you), you just need to start with a few basic steps.

• What needs to be done - You probably have a long list of tasks that you know need to be completed.  The first thing is to organize these tasks by project in order to better keep track of them.  This can be done in a simple word processing document or a spreadsheet or even just with pen and paper. 
  
• Who needs to do it - Now that you have a better handle on what you need done, you need to make sure that you know who's going to do it.  By assigning people to tasks, you can accomplish two things:  You will know that someone is working on a task and that they are responsible for it, and you will be able to make sure that people are not getting overloaded by taking on too many tasks while others aren't working on as many things.  
• When it needs to be done - Arguable the most important of the steps is setting the timeline for when things need to be done.  Each task should be assigned the day that it is due and how much time is alotted to work on it.  By doing this, you can see what are the prioritized tasks as well as if you have many tasks that need to be completed at the same time so you don't get overwhelmed when a deadline approaches.  

Forget the traditional road map for a minute, the road map we are referring to here is really a process of evaluation leading to strategic planning. It is an in-depth analysis of how the fire department deploys its resources.  Why is that important? Well, consider the investment a community makes inproviding fire protection services. That investment is a cost like any other public service and should be subject to the same control and management applied to other municipal department budgets.  

The cost of public fire protection in the US is significant and rising, as are the losses caused by fires. American communities, in part because of our national culture, have always assumed the burden of providing public fire protection. In most cases, public fire protection is simply the fire department. Unfortunately, from the national to the state to the local level, we pay only lip service to technical efficiencies such as automatic firesprinkler systems and fire codes that could help to reduce fire protection costs. Requiring the installation of automatic fire sprinkler systems reduces total loss in dollars due to fire and helps to save lives and by implication, automatic sprinkler systems could ultimately help to reduce the cost of public fire protection.

While sprinkler systems reduce fire losses, do not reduce the need for a fire department they simply allow for a smaller and more efficient one. Since we are not moving toward a universal mandate for sprinklers, we should instead seek efficiencies in how we manage and deploy fire services.  Funded in the municipal budget, the local fire department competes for tax dollars as do the police, public works, and school system. To highlight efficiencies, police chiefs long ago recognized the value of agency accreditation to validate the management controls applied within their individual departments. Within the past few years, fire chiefs have begun to recognize the value of national accreditation.

The foundation of fire service accreditation rests upon the so-called standard of cover (or the SOC). The SOC is actually a creation of the British Fire Service. In Great Britain, the Home Office used the SOC to manage their collective fire services nationalized after WW II. It only took 50 years for this revolutionary concept to make its way across the big pond to America. Today, the best and most effective American fire departments have developed their own standard of cover to qualify and quantify the level of service provided.

By definition, the standard of cover consists of…those written procedures that determine the distribution and concentration of fixed and mobile resources of a fire agency within a given community. (Source: (http://publicsafetyexcellence.org) The SOC is applicable fulltime and volunteer fire departments, both large and small. At its core, the SOC defines the most appropriate levels of service for a community based on risk and available resources because no one size fits all.  PolicyOne recently conducted a resource deployment study for the Fire Departmentof the City of Lewiston, Maine. A large part of that evaluation included a study of fire station locations using GIS software. PolicyOne provides basic and advanced analysis of municipal fire services. See what we have to offer by visiting our fire service webpage at: http://www.policyoneresearch.com/FireService.asp

Reprinted from the USFA release of 21 July 2009:

The International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC) Technology Council, in partnership with the U.S. Fire Administration, has produced a new podcast, The Power of GIS. This 10 minute video offers a quick tutorial for fire chiefs and decision makers interested in using GIS. The video has 3 components: understanding GIS, partnering with the GIS community, and seeing the power of GIS.