It is time to change...

Fire Services, like every other public service, are dealing with a world of unprecedented, unexpected and unplanned changes. We need to be able to adjust, re-think and execute plans more quickly and more frequently than ever before.

But how are we to maintain quality assurance when so many more of our teams are working from home? What must we do differently to ensure community safety when we can’t do home safety visits, and what impact does that have on callouts and injuries? How will we improve our outcomes when the way we do things keeps changing through different phases of work pattern, including lock-down, staff illness and absence, crisis action planning, merging locations, lending drivers to the NHS and keeping track of decisions that need reversing after COVID-19?

We’ve had the privilege of working with Fire Services across the UK for over a decade, implementing custom systems to report and improve on everything from incidents, home safety checks and IRMP to corporate risk, action plans, projects, executive reports, committee reports, station plans and more.

And it’s time for change.

For many years, we’ve seen Fire Services work on separate, scattered systems for different aspects of management. Some teams battle with a bewildering array of spreadsheets to add their vital operational data into management reporting, while some have to tackle multiple different action plans and action lists that have been generated by multiple different meetings minutes, station and watch action plans, HMICFRS action plans, Health and Safety, audit action plans and more.

Some brigades have a “Frankenstein” hybrid of digital, manual and spreadsheet systems and a plethora of un-aligned plans with which to plan, report and manage.

Plans are often only revised sporadically - often after several years – because after all, how much business challenge and change can there really be in a monopoly that ‘squirts water for a living’?

But this year is like no other and the disjointed systems and processes for managing and improving our Fire Services are no longer fit for purpose.

How then, can we make a digital step change? How, for example, can we prepare for performance success for the next financial year and improve staff connectivity to achieve the best level of performance from remote teams?

Over the past twelve months of the pandemic, InPhase have been hard at work creating an integrated digital suite of ready-to-use apps for Fire Services, drawing on the best practices from our experiences with the likes of South Wales Fire, Buckinghamshire Fire, East Sussex FRS, Scottish Fire and others, as well as our decades of doing the same for the NHS and Local Authorities.

The result is a new, integrated suite of best practise-led apps that will deliver a step change in your service management.

Why ‘integrated’? Because viable plans created with our apps will not only include projects and actions but will also identify the operational objectives that lead to planned outcomes, as well as the risk that may impact them.

undertaking. And those risks in turn require procedures (controls) and actions (mitigations) which individuals, watches, stations and departments all need to deliver.

When reporting and managing their performance and governance, Fire Services need to be able to see their current performance - where it’s succeeding, where it’s failing, where it needs to change, what’s currently being done to change it, what’s previously been tried (and whether it succeeded or failed), what needs collaboration and what should be done next. Not only do they need to plan what comes next, they must also have a clear view of how those changes are progressing and what impact they will have.

It’s 2021 and these days we no longer need to cobble together disparate systems, reports, spreadsheets, emails, minutes, documents, presentations and yet more emails. Today we can use a single, intuitive digital solution that provides integrated assurance of the whole management approach for a modern Fire Brigade.

There’s no need to put up with wasted resources, failure to deliver plans or confusion over priorities anymore. Talk to us about InPhase Fire.

We are holding a free web conference on the 9th February on "How to Seamlessly Integrate Planning, Performance, Project and Risk". Visit the signup page and save your seat here.

Robert Hobbs

Chief Executive Officer

InPhase’s Chief Executive and Founder, Robert has been the visionary leading InPhase to be one of the UK's leading providers of management, governance and assurance solutions, and helping organisations align their actions and goals more easily and efficiently with InPhase's suite of integrated apps.