'COMPLETED STAFF WORK': GETTING IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME!

摘要

Successful fire departments create their own future by concentrating on and anticipating issues that affect service delivery. This process involves members who seek out organizational problems and then develop innovative ways to solve them. Nothing could make a chief's job easier than an organization full of people who are constantly seeking out potential problems and fixing them before they become real "show stopper" issues. On the other hand, nothing can frustrate a chief more than when these same people seek out potential problems and then recommend solutions that don't get to the root cause of the problem. The problem for most decision makers in medium to large organizations is they don't have time for intimate involvement in every issue and, therefore, must rely on others to do research and report the pros and cons of a particular recommendation. For most decision makers this process can be akin to walking through a mine field without a map: each step forward has the potential to end the journey or cripple the traveler. Even in the best scenario, the decision maker will be using a map of the mine field prepared by someone else, and that in itself is reason to have confidence the map was prepared correctly.