Six Essentials for Organization Excellence

Our Strategic Plan is designed to chart a path for the realization of our vision. Its primary purpose is to ensure our organization provides the scope and quality of services our citizens expect and deserve. While our primary focus is, and should be, to create positive results outside our organization, it is imperative that the organization itself is the best it is capable of being. Organizational excellence will permit us to provide high quality service and, effectively and efficiently achieve our vision.

We have identified six "essentials" which we believe constitute the basic processes we should focus on to ensure our organization realizes its potential. The Six Essentials for Organizational Excellence are graphically depicted on an accompanying page.

Quality personnel is the keystone in our approach to achieving organizational excellence. This means we will recruit and retain people who are smart, physically fit, possess a positive can-do attitude and who are capable of being part of a team. We have and will continue to raise the bar as necessary to develop an organization of high quality personnel. We believe this is the single most important "essential" for our future success.

We will ensure that these personnel receive training that is adequate and appropriate for the challenges they face. Much of this effort will focus on achieving mastery of basic and specialized skills identified as required to respond to the challenges we face daily and also for those more rarely occurring challenges we have identified as critical based on a risk assessment of our county. We will establish standards within our organization that will encourage our personnel to pursue higher education.

Emergency operations is a team effort. We stress teamwork in all of our activities. Our organization consists of many teams; most exist for normal day to day functions while others can be assembled for less frequent but critical emergencies. Flexibility is essential if we are to maintain preparedness for the myriad of potential challenges we face. We achieve this flexibility and preparedness by mixing teams within teams operationally. This mixing is done in a mission specific manner that permits us to assemble the appropriate team that possesses the skills and capabilities for the unique challenges of specific emergencies. This approach of task organizing teams is much more efficient than attempting to maintain numerous mission specific teams intact all the time, particularly for incidents that may only rarely occur.

Organizational excellence in the emergency services is dependent upon personnel effectively responding to various situations quickly and reliably. This means there must be sufficient guidance provided through the use of Directives and Standard Operating Guidelines. We are conducting a thorough risk analysis of our county, which will serve to prevent our being "surprised" by any type of an emergency. This will also ensure that we will have Standard Operating Guidelines as needed for any conceivable emergency.

We will continue to update our apparatus and equipment to ensure we remain current with "state of the art" technology. However, we will only purchase what we believe will actually improve our effectiveness and avoid the latest "fad." Our equipment will be off the shelf rather than custom whenever possible. This keeps cost at a minimum, ensures product support, reduces the time from purchase to use and generally ensures a more user friendly product that reduces training time and cost. We also believe that over reliance on technology can be harmful. We want to explore the use of state of the art technology that will make us more effective but avoid the trap of becoming so reliant on it that we cannot function effectively if it fails. Basic, simple equipment and procedures is still the best approach in emergency situations and we will emphasize, maintain and/or perfect those elements.

Finally, we believe that officer leadership development is critical. Our officers need to be innovative and effective leaders who confidently move our organization forward. We have a shared vision of the future and encourage all of our personnel to be pro-active decision makers while using our mission, vision, values and goals for guidance. This approach allows us to react rapidly to changing conditions and consequently, provide the best possible service to our citizens. We believe that leadership can be taught and developed and that effective leadership is a vital and essential element in our quest for excellence.