Emergency Response Planning – Prepare for the worst with Verto 365

Emergency response planning is a necessary evil for public-facing organisations to ensure the communities they operate for are in safe hands. But overcoming potential risks and keeping everything on track doesn’t have to be a laborious chore.

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A team managing project risks around a desk

Creating your toolkit

No one could have foreseen the 2020’s pandemic, forcing organisations across multiple sectors to violently swerve from their carefully thought-out success strategy to one of pure survival. But that is what happened.

Now, with hindsight, we can show you how to use Verto 365 to develop an emergency response planning toolkit to apply again and again to any future risk planning exercise that may affect you or the community you are serving.

A rapid response toolkit will benefit you in many ways:

A readymade template can help to reduce time spent on organising your response from the get-go leaving more time to action tasks immediately.
Having a template in place leaves more room for continuously improving the methodology every time you use it, instead of building it from scratch and coming across the same stumbling blocks each time.
End-to-end project planning including Kanban boards
A faster response aids community relations and, depending on the severity and scale of the emergency, may reduce safety risks, financial risks or health risks within your community.

How Verto 365 can help

At the beginning of any project or task, it’s important to understand the goal. Many of our clients have come to us with the challenges they know Verto 365 can help them get to grips with, such as:

Work in an agile way
Implement collaboration tools for a remote workforce
Create a consistent approach to projects
Eliminate siloed working practices
Reduce time spent reporting
Improve the culture of work within the organisation
Streamline the flow of information

And there are many more ways that Verto 365 can help you to streamline your innovation management processes. All forms of improvement that refine and upgrade are forms of innovation, and that is exactly how Verto 365 can support the business.

What are we planning for?

While CV-19 was a once in a lifetime incident that we all hope won’t happen again, there are some risks that are more foreseeable depending on where you are based.

Climate change: This is affecting everyone and everything. Planning for reversing the negative effects caused by climate change in every area of the country can be mapped out, and actioned by residents and businesses by creating community strategies to make sustainable living easier for the average person.
Flood response: Low land areas that are at risk of flooding can use Verto 365 to support community links by connecting organisations like those able to help with food, shelter, maintenance and health to speed up recovery and aid the safety of all residents affected.
Pandemic response: Many workers found themselves in new roles during 2020 as business sought to create response teams to rally round and survive the hit. Grouping workstreams so focus remained despite the chaos happening helped many companies gain sight of how not to fail earlier than others.
Occupational incident: Sometimes unfortunate and unforeseeable events happen where the response needs to be immediate and mitigation methods to prevent further destruction must be developed fast.

Coordination tools

Easily group like-minded organisations required to help with the particular response. Verto 365 is one option to house all the relevant information, including data points such as contact details, types of experience, and levels of interest for relevant council coordinators and local health organisations. Or local businesses who can act as suppliers, and community members with relevant expertise. Verto 365 allows you to create an oversight group to manage the coordination of all workstreams.

Organise programmes of work for these groups using the gateway stages to easily manage and progress through projects with your team. Include the level of detail that works for you. Everything is kept in one place so all members can access the documents and data whenever they need to and from wherever they may be.

Activation tools

Creating community hubs, managed from the Verto 365 platform (like unused building space, coffee shops for meeting venues, sports teams and schools) is a way some Verto 365 users have employed the available activation tools to manage crisis situations. The hubs generate community involvement and create more ways to activate a response to a crisis. Many also find a purpose to get involved and feel more a part of their local area.

These tools can collate member details and discussion topics while also helping to manage back-end details such as venue costs, availability and scheduling. They are designed to keep you progressing through your task list, achieving your milestones to keep you accountable, while the percentage indicator shows your exact progress. Benefits are tracked on an ongoing basis so realising them can be achieved earlier and keep up to date with any issues and risks as they happen so there’s no need to fall behind.

Reporting tools

Having a good sense of how a project is progressing is vital when responding to emergency situations. Quickly and easily generate snapshots of how successful your plan is.

Pull reports on anything at any stage. Report on resourcing to show who’s allocated to what, the time they have spent on their tasks and whether there is space for them to take on more. Understand what issues and risks might be looming from being able to access reporting tools early on.

Risks can appear at any time when dealing with unstable situations. Actions and decisions can also be reported on. Pull logs to stay on top of every moving part within the whole operation.

Auditing tools

Verto 365 provides a complete and comprehensive audit trail to reassure management and justify to creditors and auditors when assessing the outcomes.

Log actions to track the full journey to completion. Look back on tasks to provide the rationale for spending in certain areas. See all parts of a decision-making process in one place. Careful reviewing of a programme following completion provides the opportunity to look for areas of improvement for implementation within the next emergency response plan.

What else can Verto do?

Verto 365 has fully configurable workflow so that workspaces and projects can move through defined stages and approvals. The workflows can be set up in multiple ways by different teams and departments across the organisation according to project size and complexity. They can be customised to incorporate approvals and a complete audit trail.

Verto boasts powerful reporting at multiple levels
Export in different formats including Word, Excel, PDF, CSV, TIFF etc
All reports are run in real-time, so only the latest information is presented
Use ‘tags and filters’ to ‘slice and dice’ the data as much as required
And use our data extracts for tools such as PowerBI, Tableau and QlikView

Verto records quantitative and qualitative benefits which are then tracked and reported against at multiple levels, via the dashboard and comprehensive reports.

Financial management allows users to track cost profiles over time, providing full transparency on project spend. Financial integrations with systems such as SAP, Oracle, Pegasus, Agresso

Manage and track scheduled and planned resources including heatmap views
See where each resource is planned and current utilisation percentages
Actively monitor resource allocation and capacity for any given day
Assign rate cards to resource roles and specific time periods
Full Timesheet management and approvals down to task level

Link project outputs to performance outcomes and KPIs across the organisation
Create performance groups and objectives to ease the management of multiple KPIs
Compare performance against other departments, services and organisations and track progress
Produce custom reports, plans and graphs tailored to suit each organisation’s needs