How Emergency Response Helps Project Execution

Jiju ‘Jay’ Nair is a Senior Manager with Fannie Mae driving Cloud Transformation and adoption. He is an avid advocate for using innovative project and process management principles for building reliable and sustainable products.

  Communications Management   Governance   PMO   Risk Management   Strategy  

When United States federal agencies are called upon to resolve a crisis, what do they do? Without doubt, they will follow the Incident Command System (ICS). This set of concepts, policies and procedures guide federal response teams to effectively address any emergency situations. The intent in establishing such a system is to provide clarity in managing activities during a highly time-compressed and stressful environment.

How can such a system designed for emergency responses be used for normal project executions? While most of the project situations may not to have to adopt the elements of ICS, some projects that are set up to resolve a certain time-bound resolution of organizational priorities like re-audit requirements or corporate merge efforts can reap the benefits.

Let’s examine the major concepts of the Incident Command System and how we can draw parallels with projects aiming to resolve corporate issues. The ICS is a sub-component of the National Incident Management System (NIMS) that provides best practices for managing national emergency situations. At the heart of it, the ICS provides an analysis and response mechanism that provides a clear plan of action in the event of an unpredicted incident. Most U.S. Federal agencies are required to follow this system even if they are addressing a small-scale incident as it provides them with valuable experience…

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