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Crisis Management in Action (Part 2 of 2)
Bob Weinstein is a journalist who covers technology, project management, the workplace and career development.
When Andrew Boyarsky was hired as project director of the City University of New York’s Coastal Storm Emergency Sheltering Program, he faced enormous problems. The biggest one was training 27,000 city workers to fill supervisory and management jobs -no simple task, by any stretch of the imagination.
One thing was more than obvious: Training that many people in a classroom was impossible. At a rate of 200 students per day, it would have taken more than a full year of round-the-clock training classes to cover the entire supervisory staff. That idea was quickly scrapped and replaced by a better one: an online training program. It was the most expedient way to train that many people, according to CSESP decision-makers.
A training program was fashioned that was comprised of both online and classroom-based courses--some done preseason before a hurricane event, with other training for the entire staff taking place just prior to or during an actual coastal storm event.
By October 2007, the CSESP had trained almost 14,000 staff members, more than 10,000 of them online and close to 4,000 in the classroom. To date, it has trained a total of 19,000 storm staff from 20 government agencies in their responsibilities in the emergency sheltering system.
“The CSESP sheltering system is scalable so that it can respond to different storm levels,&…
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