As a new year begins, what can you say to your members and your community about your progress in 2010, and what you need (and why you need it) to achieve your goals in 2011? If you have a process to benchmark your services, then you likely have a lot to say. If you don't use benchmarks, now is a good time to begin.
Benchmarking — the process of comparing one's business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and/or best practices from other industries — is an established business practice, which when applied to a fire/EMS environment can be a major tool to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of the service that we provide.
If a business does not perform well in relation to those providing the same products or services — if they don't grow, improve and continue to meet the changing needs of their customers — they will fail. Increasingly, fire departments are finding themselves under that same threat. Once again, it is time to take a page from the business world and consider benchmarking as a means of evaluating performance.
We can benchmark just about any function or service we perform — and some departments already are. For example, the Calgary Fire Department benchmarks more than 300 different points within its operation. But one of the benefits of benchmarking is the flexibility it provides to tailor the process to your needs. Ideally, when you institute a benchmarking process for your organization, it should be one that is both significant and attainable, and which corresponds to your overall mission. Some successful organizations benchmark as few as 20 points.
For many years, the fire/EMS industry has been collecting performance-measurement data and should continue to do so. Such data are helpful in identifying accomplishments. But raw data lack comparative analyses — which is the foundation of benchmarking.
Fire/EMS benchmarking calls first for identifying best practices within our industry and then establishing performance measurements to achieve those models within our organizations. Here again, the term "best practices" reflects what works best, and what best fits the needs of your department. They can be found internally, externally in comparable organizations, and in national standards. By looking outward we can examine how others achieve their performance levels, understand the processes used to excel, and apply lessons learned toward improved performance.
Benchmarking should be used to compare one's organization against its own performance (internal evaluation) and against outside organizations (external evaluation), focusing on similar missions in order to see how we are performing in relation to others in our industry. In most cases, an organization will need to look at national statistics and other organizations that provide similar services in order to establish a list of meaningful comparisons and best practices.
This process also allows us to see what other organizations are doing better — or maybe just different — than us. We often get so focused on improving what we currently are doing that we become blind to more-efficient or cutting-edge techniques.
Benchmarking should not be considered a one-off exercise. To be beneficial, it must become an ongoing, integral part of the improvement process with the goal of continually improving the services we provide. In general, the major benefit of benchmarking is that the things we benchmark seem to get accomplished; if we cannot see success or identify failure, we cannot learn from or improve it. Finally, in these difficult economic times, if we don't have a way to demonstrate results and needs, it will be difficult to get support for continued funding and additional needed resources.
Jack Parow is the president of the International Association of Fire Chiefs. He also is fire chief in Chelmsford, Mass., a 33-year veteran of the fire service.
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