BY MARK WALLACE
Planning is a process, not a destination. When it comes to planning, we should be less concerned about achieving conformity to a set of rules and regulations than about getting everyone focused on the direction in which the organization should be moving. From this perspective, we know that you’ve got to have a plan.
FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION IN OUR BUSINESS
We’ve all heard that fire departments should operate more like a business. We study business management, read business books, go to business management courses, and try to apply business practices to our department. When a business management guru bring his “dog and pony show” to town, we all flock to the local arena and sit with 10,000 of our closest friends to gain the wisdom from one or more of the “masters.”
However, the operating strategy of a fire department is not the same as a for-profit business. We operate in a different environment.
A business has one fundamental, overarching strategy, which is to make a profit. You might get away with a slow start-up; you might have a down year or two. However, in the long term, if you don’t perform, you fail and go out of business.
Failure in the fire service is not an option. I’m not talking about an isolated incident or any particular emergency response. Regardless of the outcome of a particular incident, the fire service must continue to exist and provide the critical services our communities demand.
A community often deals with bad outcomes by throwing more resources, more equipment, more personnel, and more focus on the department. If a building burns down in a community in a spectacular fashion, the question after “What happened?” is “Do we need to buy you a new ladder truck?”or “If we could buy you a new truck or add more firefighters, can we prevent this from happening again?”
It’s even more challenging when you consider that we are tasked not only with succeeding but with balancing our financial inputs and outputs. What is the consequence for the fire chief if the annual budget is overspent? The money needed to meet the overexpenditure has to come from someplace. You might get away with a cost overrun on your operating budget if you are part of a municipal, county, state, or federal organization once in awhile but not if you are a special district organization and don’t have the deep pockets of big government to bail you out. It might be accepted as an isolated exception but not as a standard practice each year.
We never get enough money in our budgets. We normally have to decide what we can get away with by not doing something instead of thinking of what we can do with all of this extra cash the City Council gave us to spend.
So when we really compare the challenges of a for-profit business to the budgetary challenges of a fire department, we have a much tougher job. We have to get it right every year. We can’t legally spend more than our approved budget, and if we have too much left at the end of the budget year, we usually have to give it back. If we give it back, we’ll never get the funds back if we just didn’t have time to make the approved expenditure in many cases.
Make no mistake about it: We can’t operate like a business because we must be better than that. When considering the big picture, if we don’t get it right, people may die. That can’t be compared to “I can’t make my boat payment this month because we didn’t make a profit.”
MEETING THE CHALLENGE WITH BETTER PLANNING
So how do we effectively deal with this challenge? An important part of this complex answer is to plan better. Our main challenge is seldom operations [in the National Incident Management System context; new rules require us to be NIMS compliant]. Our challenges are planning and logistics. It’s too big a risk to do otherwise. You’ve got to have a plan. But where do we start?
The people in the fire service are generally oriented toward action and results. So if we start with the goal of getting results, what kind of plan is needed? How do we know which direction to go and which direction will guide us toward the desired endpoint.
Planning to get measurable results within a defined time frame is operational planning. Operational plans should be SMART:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Results Oriented
- Time Limited.
At the same time, operational plans must deal with specific time horizons for several types of considerations. There should be long-range, mid-range, short-range, and action plans. In the business books, each type of plan is given a specific time horizon within which to complete it. I have redefined these time constraints in terms that appear to make sense for the fire service.
Action plans include the specific projects and programs currently underway. Action plans are funded by the current budget. They are very specific and have tasks underway today for which results will be achieved within the current budget, with few exceptions.
Short-range plans, also called short-term plans, may be projects that have not started but will be accomplished within the next 6-12 months. Sometimes, the results will be achieved in a time horizon that is slightly beyond the current budget yeart. More often than not, the short-range plan is nearly the same as the action plan. Short-range plans also should be SMART.
Mid-range, mid-term, and medium-range plans are different terms for the same planning horizon. An important consideration for a fire department is that a mid-range plan runs beyond the current budget cycle but before the current terms of the majority of your elected officials have been completed.
This is an important planning horizon, particularly when you have a situation in which your elected officials have set a direction for the community through their focus on political issues. Remember that everything in government is political. But as long as the current group of elected officials stays in office, their desired direction will not change very radically unless some catastrophic event causes a major shift in priorities.
The projects and programs you believe you can get adopted by the current group of elected officials is not certain until they actually vote to approve the program or plan. You can be reasonably sure how they will vote based on their past actions and priorities. Their past actions, directions, and policies also are good indicators of their future decisions.
In mid-range plans, the SMART parameters are not quite as specific, measurable, or achievable as they would be if they were actually funded in the current budget. Often, mid-range plans have a maximum time-frame of up to three years, with the short end of this range being more realistic. Generally speaking, the farther into the future plans go, the fuzzier the plans get.
PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE
Long-range or long-term operational plans have a time horizon beyond the terms of your current set of elected officials, which often are longer than three years. With staggered terms for elected officials, this division is a trend more than a defined parameter. Plans beyond five years into the future are more wishes and guesses than real plans in terms of local government. Still, long-range plans contain real projects or programs that are anticipated based on the trends and challenges the department is facing today.
Planning into the future requires that you define various planning assumptions. For example, if you assume that your community is going to grow in population by eight percent per year, you could predict what the population might be in 10 years. If you happen to be correct, your plan should be pretty close to reality. Chances are better that you will be wrong. The farther you predict into future years, the less your chance of accuracy.
Long-range plans, however, are important to keep the organization focused on the future as well as the present. They should reinforce the principles espoused by your mission, vision, values, and strategies for the future. Your long-range plan should lead you to successfully achieve your vision of the ideal future state of the department. If your department could meet your wildest dreams for the organization, how would the organization look, feel, and perform? Long-range plans can be stretched into the future to predict how long it might take to reach excellence.
Long-range plans encourage cross-functional planning and communication. You can’t make long-range plans in a vacuum. By involving various members of your organization across functional areas of responsibility, the ultimate vision of your future can be more fully understood and predicted. This encourages planning from the perspective of the big picture of the future of the organization.
There are four key elements of long-range planning:
Key strategic areas include the major programs of the organization, such as suppression, EMS, prevention, and public education. Critical issues identified in your strategic plan should be reflected in your long-range plans. Long-term plans might include the prediction of the future construction of a number of fire stations in your community as the population expands and new areas of the city become built up or are annexed into your response district. Strategic action plans are just that-what has to happen strategically over time to achieve the ultimate vision of your ideal future.
Long-range plans are the bridge between your strategic plan and your operational plan. These plans gives you guidance and direction for years to come but include measurable projects that are predicted for completion at an anticipated future date, even though the reality of this is mostly uncertain.
Long-range plans usually follow along a more-or-less linear progression of constant growth, and these plans often are structured on an “if-then” basis. For example, if you are reasonably confident that your predictions are accurate, then this is what you need to build, buy, hire, design, or initiate. However, if you lose confidence in this prediction, the “then” part of the equation must be adjusted to reflect a newly revised prediction.
Here is a tangible example of an “if-then” scenario:
McKinney, Texas, is a city that is growing rapidly. In the past five years, its growth rate has varied from a low of 13 percent to an annual high of 22 percent. Looking forward, few people really believe the growth will continue at these rates, but 12 percent is the projected rate of future growth for planning purposes. Since our population was more than 104,000 at the beginning of 2006, we are predicting it will top 150,000 sometime during 2010.
If the city grows at a faster rate, we’ll get to that population sooner. If growth slows, it will take longer. Each time we receive additional information, we can revise our guess. Using the 12 percent rate as a benchmark, we can begin to predict how many more fire stations, fire engines, truck companies, medical units, and firefighters we will need to meet the performance benchmarks we set. Will any of this be reality in 2010? We will have to wait and see. In the meantime, as we get better information, we will make more accurate predictions.
STRATEGIC PLANNING PROVIDES GUIDANCE
Your strategic plan is not based on time horizons for the achievement of measurable results. It is designed to provide guidance and direction to your operational plans.
For example, the strategy guiding the long-range operating plan may indicate that we replace fire engines at the end of their useful service life, which we think will be every 10 years. However, it is entirely possible that in eight years the maintenance costs of keeping that truck will dramatically increase and indicate that we should replace these units earlier. On the other hand, if we are approaching the 10-year projected replacement date for a fire engine and it is operating effectively (not breaking down, staying reliable, and meeting the service demands we place on the unit), we should keep it an extra year or two.
However, strategically if our desire is to sell our replaced vehicles before they become maintenance nightmares or before it becomes difficult to get replacement parts, it may make sense to replace the unit on schedule.
Strategic plans address the strategic issues a community is facing, such as rapid growth. Strategic plans focus on values, mandates, mission, your philosophy of operations, and your vision for the ideal future of your organization. Strategic plans are more intuitive than analytical. Operational plans are more analytical than intuitive.
A strategic plan normally describes the organization by clarifying and listing its values, vision, mandates, mission, and philosophy of operations. A strategic planning process also should assess the external and internal environments of the department.
These considerations lead to the identification of strategic issues, which are global issues the department must address over time. Understanding the strategic issues an organization is facing is the heart of strategic planning. From these issues are developed the strategies that will guide and direct the department over the next planning period and beyond.
CREATING THE MASTER PLAN
How do these plans fit together into one planning continuum? This can be accomplished by consolidating your planning efforts into a single plan called a master plan. The components of a master plan are the strategic plan, plus all of the operational plans.
The three “Ps” of master planning include perspective, position, and performance. Strategic planning leads to and provides perspective. Having a strategic perspective provides guidance and direction to the organization’s ideal future. Long-range planning puts your organization in the position needed to achieve future success. By laying out the long-range milestones, an organization will be in a better position to achieve those desired outcomes. Operational planning leads to performance. It’s the operational plans that create the measurable performance of today to move the organization closer to its vision of an ideal future.
Master planning is about creating change within the organization over time. If you spend the time to plan but don’t create change, your efforts have largely been wasted. Effective master planning is proactive. You work to create the changes you desire. Without effective planning, you can only react: The circumstance you face drive the organization, and you are just along for the ride.
Effective planning, therefore, is the difference between being the driver along the road you choose and being a passenger on a rudderless ship at sea.
Ideally, it is the strategic plan that drives the focus of the entire master plan. In reality, the process is a continuum and completion of one component of the master plan that logically leads into the next time horizon. The operational plans of the department can be considered at present and into longer planning horizons, or you can start at the long-range plan and work back toward your current action plans.
Your department’s logic will direct you. Many departments work from the action plan or short-range plans first. The annual budget is often the deciding parameter. Many fire departments prefer to start with the current tasks at hand and progressively work their way beyond the approved budget.
A master plan is progressive-that is, it progresses from today out into the future and as far as you think it is worth the time and effort to develop. However, the bottom line of this activity is constant: You’ve got to have a plan!
MARK WALLACE is chief of the McKinney (TX) Fire Department and former chief of the Golden (CO) Fire Department. He taught fire investigation throughout the United States and in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand for more than 20 years and taught fire investigation courses for the National Fire Academy. He is a past president of the Colorado State Fire Chiefs Association and the author of Fire Department Strategic Planning: Creating Future Excellence (Fire Engineering, 1998); a second edition is in production. He is the sole proprietor of Fire Eagle Ltd., a consulting firm.
