Project Management Lessons from the San Bernardino Tragedy

Effective Incident Management

On Monday December 2, 2015 two people opened fire during a holiday party in San Bernardino, California leaving 14 dead and 21 injured. The nation watched as law enforcement officials managed one of the more dramatic crises in recent memory. What they saw was a job well done.

While it does represent an example of effective incident management it also holds some surprising lessons for all managers, especially those involved in project management.

Organizing the Management Process

Consider the challenge of managing an incident of this size and significance. A useful tool for planning, organizing, executing and controlling the process is the Work Breakdown Structure, a tool familiar to those in the project management.

A Work Breakdown Structure, WBS, can be described as a visual display of tasks in a project. This display is similar to an inverted tree and decomposes the project into successive levels of greater and greater detail. Further, its major advantage is that the completed tree defines all the tasks that need to be accomplished to deliver the desired result. As such, it defines the scope of the project.

A simplified version of the WBS for the San Bernardino crisis is shown on the following slide.

Work Breakdown Structure

Plan

Mutual Aid

Local

LocalAvailability

RegionalAvailability

AvailablePersonnel

AvailableEquipment

Resource Availability

Priority Assessment

Information Report

CommunicationStrategy

Org Structure

TipsNational Database

LocalDatabase

ATFFBI

InterpolReport

WitnessReport

Work Breakdown Structure

Each task in the tree represents a deliverable. At the top is the final deliverable, a incident management plan. The layer below the top, the second level, represents those deliverables that go into the strategic plan. In this situation the deliverables include the establishment of an organizational structure, resource availability report, priority assessments, information report and communication strategy. The tree then continues to expose more and more details for each of its parent tasks. The following slides further describe the second level deliverables that contribute to the plan.

Organization

Shortly after the first shots were fired, and the magnitude of the situation became clear, one of the major challenges was to establish an organization structure that would clearly define lines of authority and control within and between the many organizations involved.

Creating a WBS was further complicated by a fluid situation in which events happened quickly and the number of stakeholders increased over a very short period of time.

Accordingly, the organizational structure changed as evidenced by the increasing role taken by the FBI as the likelihood increased that the attack could be linked to a terrorist organization.

Resource Availability

The human resources needed to manage the situation included local San Bernardino authorities, mutual aid from neighboring regions, FBI and ATF. At the early stages only local resources were available but shortly thereafter access to others grew rapidly. But in addition to human resources was the need to call upon physical resources such as personnel carriers and riot vehicles.

Real-time reports on human and physical resources were instrumental in managing the process.

Resource Assignments

One example of a resource assignment is shown to the right where police officers transported witnesses to a field where they interviewed witnesses after the shooting.

Another is the deployment of FBI agents to the suspects home after a search warrant was obtained to establish motives and uncover any information that could lead to others who may have been involved.

Priorities and Tasks

Plans depend upon priorities. The first priority was to find and stop the shooters. When it was clear that they there were no longer in the building, then the second was to tend to the wounded.

But there were other demands that required immediate attention. They included moving survivors to a common location where they could be interviewed for possible clues to the identity of the shooters, stopping and searching all cars leaving the city, following leads to find the perpetrators, determining if the shooters had accomplices, searching the suspect’s apartment, and ensuring this was not an ongoing threat to the city, region or country.

Information Overload

Shortly after the shooting began, the flow of information started to increased at an increasing rate. What resulted was the classic case of information overload. It came from witnesses at the scene, police officers, tips from citizens, and a wide range of databases located in the state, country and overseas agencies (Interpol).

The challenge was to determine which data was significant , how sense could be made of it, and which data needed to be moved up the chain of command.

Priorities

Priorities change and not all demands can be thoughtfully managed. One example occurred when police were in pursuit of the black SUV down East San Bernardino Avenue. As the chase gained momentum an increasing number of law enforcement vehicles abandoned their assignments and joined in pursuit of the vehicle. It was a moment in the management of this process that demanded a mix between a spontaneous and managed response by authorities.

Nonetheless, every effort was made to respond to the fluid nature of this operation with as carefully determined plan as possible.

Communication Strategy

Communication was particularly effective. Especially communication to the public, a process that was carefully orchestrated and delivered.

Every person who briefed the press was aware of the extent of their authority to speak about the unfolding events.

What was noteworthy was the attention given to keeping the press informed. Briefings where initially scheduled every hour at the beginning of the crises and then every few hours until dusk at which time the press was informed that the next conference would be held in the morning. While press conferences were often delayed, there was still a sense of a commitment to maintaining communication to the public.

Complex, Fluid and Dynamic

A WBS can ‘suggest’ a static process and firm plans. But, this operation made it very clear that this was not the case.

What became clear from San Bernardino was that planning was dynamic. In response to events and new information priorities changed, resource deployments changed, organizational structure changed and even communication plans changed.

San Bernardino and New Orleans

Dynamic planning worked for San Bernardino while New Orleans suffered from an inflexible approach to managing the aftermath of hurricane Katrina; lives were lost, property destroyed, and surviving victims left without help. Many pointed to the inability of agencies to establish a working organization structure, ineffective deployment of resources, lack of communication among political, law enforcement and national guard organizations.

Whatever the reasons, the result was that New Orleans responders were unable to create an effective and dynamic plan in response to a complex and fluid situation.

Lessons Learned

Certainly there are major differences between managing a project or incident in a commercial or governmental organization and managing a public crisis. Nonetheless, contrasting the way in which the San Bernardino shootout was managed with projects in organizations does suggest that there are some lessons to be learned.

What does stand out is that projects in both situations unfold in fluid environments. For most organizations that environment is dominated by a competitive market. Products change, processes change, suppliers change, technology changes and prices change. What we learn from the San Bernardino incident is that to deliver an effective performance in a complex and fluid situation demands that organizational flexibility is essential.

Lessons Learned

There are countless examples of organizations that have been burdened by inflexible cultures. They include General Motors (product development) Merck (side effects …Vioxx) Circuit City (retail strategy), Nokia (cell phone design), Volkswagen (emission tests) and Takata (air bags). They steadfastly held onto strategies that in the end caused great harm to them and their customers. But, most importantly, they were unable to respond quickly to changing conditions, reconsider their priorities and revise their strategic plans. Indeed, static plans are the barriers to project success.

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