NZFS | Station Management System
The New Zealand Fire Service, you might think, is all about blokes rushing about in big red fire engines. In reality, ‘putting out fires’ is only part of the service’s emergency work (which also includes attending crashes, chemical spills and floods), and all of that incident response only takes up a minority of staff hours.
The Project:
NZFS wanted a computer system that would help them make the most of that ‘non-emergency’ time. They wanted that work planning system in staff hands, so that each station decided their own priorities based on their local knowledge. But it wasn’t to be built from scratch – it had to consolidate and expand existing systems.
Provoke had already worked with NZFS on two projects: ICARUS which piloted the electronic capture of paper-based ‘risk profiles’ for individual properties, and FIRMS which combined those risk profiles with an existing reporting system and spatial data about evacuation systems.
This time, the chief executive wanted all that information bundled together in a work planning system where the allocation of non-emergency jobs was decided at station level, on the basis of the risk profile of their area. This shift to ‘bottom-up planning’ was part of a significant culture change for the service.
This Station Management System (SMS) had to breakdown the possible ‘non-emergency tasks’: station-based operational readiness and skills maintenance training, and off station training, building inspections, risk response planning and community education, so that individual station managers could apply the NZFS’s formal objectives (to reduce incidence and consequence of fire) to their own patch in a practical way. The system also had to provide reports that allowed stations and senior management to assess the performance of individual teams.
The design and build time was very tight (November 2003 start for a June 2004 go live). Provoke delivered Phase 1 and 2 on time and on budget, to positive feedback from staff and management alike. Further phases are now in train; Phase 1A, which finetunes job allocation from watch level to individual officers and introduces skills maintenance and rostering functions, went live in March 2005.
What the Client said...
We chose Provoke to build the Station Management System (SMS) on the strength of their previous performance. They had already shown they had good methods and good people and worked well on the ICARUS project. Their subsequent work on FIRMS proved they could write good quality code and that they could step up – in terms of the scale and complexity of the job. Now they are handling a ‘seven digit’ project with aplomb. The first SMS implementation was smooth and very well accepted by users (some 200–250 daily); our chief executive is very complimentary on the subject. This is good quality stuff.
An important attribute for me is their internal evaluation process. We know that Provoke frequently re-examines their procedures, and adjusts their approach and toolset accordingly, and they also are making the most of Microsoft’s audits of architectural quality. Their record speaks for itself; I’m happy their contribution is continuing in later phases of SMS.
Peter Clemerson
Manager, Strategic IT, NZFS
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