Good Morning Hawaii - Seek Shelter
From the Project Management in Real Life Blog
by Drake Settsu
Sharing my Project Management adventures and some tips.
I like to keep my articles brief and to the point.
Project Management is an Art, Science, and Discipline.
Just keep it simple and have fun!
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Date
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Hawaii Civil Defense
Hawaii gets a nice Saturday morning wake up alert on their phone.
Words cannot describe the initial reaction you get when you receive an alert that you need to seek immediate shelter because a ballistic missile is on it's way. You only have about 20 minutes to find your hiding place.
Project Management failed on setting up the new civil defense preparedness for a ballistic missile attack on Hawaii. The failure caused panic and pain. Your life could be ending in 20 minutes. You keep waiting for the all clear and nothing happens. It took over 38 minutes for the Hawaii Civil Defense to send out an alert that there is no threat.
Some lessons learned:
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There was no leadership from the top to bottom that day. Just confusion. They knew immediately that the alert was and error.
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Step up, no one had the guts to take charge of the situation to immediately send out an alert that there is no missile on it's way.
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How does one person have access to such a critical life and death alert without management authorizing the alert to be sent out.
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Training and safeguards was obviously missing in the project plan.
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No contingency plan was properly developed to execute in the event of an erroneous alert going out to the public.
My final thoughts on the incident is that Project Management and Leadership play such an import part no matter what type of project it is. In this case the residents and visitors in Hawaii will never forget this date 01-13-2018 because a Project Manager and lack of Leadership really really messed up bad.
Posted on: January 16, 2018 06:20 AM |
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Comments (21)
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Sromon Das
Senior Project Manager| Mara Consulting
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
Must have been terrible what people had to go through- the chaos and the panic. as a quality professional I wonder if there are any successive checks in place to prevent false alarms... hope life has returned to normalcy
Drake -
Not sure this is a failure of project management, but rather of issue management & leadership. I don't perceive a "project" but rather an issue which needed to be resolved in an appropriate manner. Help me understand if I'm missing something...
Kiron
I called it a failure in Project Management because a new warning was introduced into a system they were using to send out tsunami and weather alerts. They added a very important ballistic missile warning alert into that system that only allows you 20 minutes to prepare when you get it. No safeguards were looked at when implemented. One person could trigger it with management unaware of it.
Perfect - thanks for the clarification, Drake!
Kiron
It was an interesting Saturday. We are all ok now. Officials have a lot of explaining now.
You are spot on Kiron with the issue management. They had no clue what to do.
Sromon,
They have made some changes to not allow just one person to press the button in the future.
More than one person will be required to send the alert out. I need more assurance than that.
I would say that probably it was a failure to introduce a protocol or a Standard Operating Procedure in the system which authorizes issue of such kind of warnings to general public.
The good part was that it was just a false alarm and everyone is safe.
Najam,
Yes, a false alarm or I would not be here right now writing about this incident.
I agree that they dropped the ball on implementing a Standard Operating Procedure.
Very good, thanks for sharing
Wendy Kuerbitz (Brown)
Sr. Mgr Regulatory and Quality Projects| Fareva Richmond Inc
North Chesterfield, Va, United States
While I agree that the false alarm needs to be corrected with leadership at every level, accountability and contingency plans, it is still better that it was a "False" alarm. I can't imagine the feelings that everyone had when they saw the alert. But one of the lessons learned is that people should now know what a real alarm will feel like and be better prepared by this unfortunate opportunity.
Wendy,
Yes, the public is now being educated better on what to do if a real alert is issued.
Rami Kaibni
Community Champion
Senior Projects Manager | Field & Marten Associates
New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada
I bet this was a horrible experience for people living there .... This is the kind of False Alarm you'd never want to hear.
What if that introduction of that important ballistic missile warning into the system was a requirement in the first place, even though a wrongly conceived one?
Anish Abraham
Privacy Program Manager| University of Washington
Auburn, Wa, United States
Alarm is always scary, thanks for sharing Drake.
Anyway It looks they didn't had any process controls in place to prevent the transmission of false alert.
You are correct Anish about process controls.
Denise Canty
Agile Coach, Life Coach, Author, Senior Project-Program Manager| Cenden Company
Washington, Dc, United States
Your points are well taken, Drake! Thanks a lot and great posting!
Thank you everyone for your comments and analysis.
Frederick Oware
Senior Systems Analyst| Social Security and National Trust, Ghana.
Accra, Greater Accra, Ghana
Yeah Drake, what was the intended process for sending out such messages? will one say the project failed to establish that system-wise or officials failed to design a workable procedure base on their requirements for the system?
I like the discussion your topic has generated.
Nice piece Drake
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