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SIPA Students Partner with FDNY to Save Lives and Property
By Stephanie V. Grepo
Program Coordinator
Faculty & Curriculum Affairs
SIPA
As part of the spring 2008 workshops at SIPA, a team of seven MPA students worked with the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) on the agency’s goal to create a performance management system.
Under the guidance of SIPA Professor William Eimicke, who is the current FDNY Commissioner of Strategy and Planning, the students divided themselves into teams according to the three benchmarks that the FDNY leadership asked them to investigate. From January to April 2008, the students looked at: determining the value of property lost in NYC due to fire and water damage, developing a customer service measurement program for the EMS division of the FDNY, and preparing definitions for lives saved/rescued.
Student team leader Mark Danon, who served as a firefighter in New Castle, NY, for 10 years prior to his study at SIPA, said, “Most fire departments in the USA do not collect measures of performance. It was important for the workshop team to give the FDNY a few measures to take to the Mayor’s Office.”
Kat Thomson, who worked on the property lost benchmark, said, “Since working for the Canadian government as a wildfire fighter [for the past 11 years], I have constantly been in awe of the mismatch between policy and practice and am particularly interested in the origin of policy and standard operating procedures. This literally was one of the guiding forces that got me into studying policy at SIPA in the first place--the frustration with trying to act sensibly under policies written by non-practitioners. I found that when I was looking at existing performance management and property loss measures for the FDNY, I could easily see where some policies regarding performance were not written by firefighters but by civilian policymakers. A disconnect between the civilian policymaker and the actual firefighter can cause problems, as this generates inappropriate performance measurement in some cases.”
Student team leader Mark Danon served on the lives rescued/saved team. He explained how the team came up with definitions for lives rescued/saved: “We sent out a survey to three firefighting battalions to see what is similar in terms of lives saved in fires, car accidents and derailments. While not a scientific measure, the survey enabled us to talk about the crux of what a fire department does—saving lives.” By working closely with Emergency Medical Service Division Chief Abdo Nahmod, the customer service team drafted a sample customer service survey and provided a comprehensive menu of options that accounted for the cost and labor needed to gauge customer service.
Reflecting upon the workshop, Professor Eimicke said, “Rescue and preserving property represent the core mission of the FDNY, yet there are not credible performance indicators for these mission critical activities. The SIPA workshop team worked with FDNY to fast forward the research and development process such that we should be able to implement rescue and property protection measures in the next 12 months.” The team presented their 90-page document to Chief of Department Salvatore Cassano. According to Deputy Assistant Chief James Manahan, “The customer service survey will go online soon. A commission of senior chiefs will continue the way forward with the lives lost/saved indicator while the property lost/saved benchmark gave us credible accounting measures to consider.” He added, “The value of SIPA workshops is that we got young and energetic people who cared about the final product that they gave to us.” Professor Eimicke is currently working with the FDNY leadership on planning workshop proposals for spring 2009.
“I loved working on this FDNY capstone,” said Kat Thomson, while taking a break from a 22-day shift fighting wildfires in Canada in June 2008, “because it was immediately apparent to me that fire is fire and policy is still policy at the end of the day. Bridging the gap between the two is where the actual hard work begins.”