CASE STUDY

Effective function for crisis management at an authority

Ekan Management added experience and methodology in the work of defining and streamlining a function for crisis management at an authority.

The client: The customer is a government authority which, among other things, must contribute with expertise, remotely or on site, with the aim of supporting other actors in the event of a crisis situation. The standby function goes under the designation "Services on standby". The role, its availability and purpose are regulated through cooperation with municipalities, the rescue service and MSB.

The client's challenge: Like many other businesses, the customer worked more according to their organizational structure than according to the processes that were identified. This meant, among other things, that there were large differences between the working methods that were described in the management system and the working methods that were actually applied. As is often the case in such situations, there was great ambiguity between what one and the other part of the business did. The employees felt that the structures in the work were unclear and there were views from the National Audit Office regarding governance and management that the authority wanted to address. Servant in Emergency was one such process that suffered from several ambiguities - not least because it was also not tied to any clear part of the organization. The questions were about:

• When should the process be activated? How is the assessment made?
• What are the expectations for the role's competence, attendance, decision-making mandate, etc.?
• How should the official act when the process is activated?
• How should the process be coordinated with other actors? How should it be led and developed?

One of several challenges was that the requirements for the function were partly with external stakeholders and were not sufficiently clearly described in the principal's (Government's) mission statement and regulation letter.

The assignment: Ekan was previously involved in supporting the customer with process development, partly in specific parts of the business and partly in defining the authority's main processes. We had two consultants engaged in the assignment as a team. The request was to coordinate the definition of the process for Civil Servant in Standby between different stakeholders - both inside and outside the authority. The aim was to achieve consensus internally and externally on the expectations of the function, as well as clarify the process flow, activities and output.

The work was mostly carried out remotely through digital workshops where the participants consisted of employees who had been identified by the client together with Ekan's consultants, based on their roles and responsibilities. The external coordination took place by conducting workshops with representatives of the customer, SKR and MSB/Räddningstjänsen.

Together with particularly good knowledge of the business, the defined activity flows were then supplemented with the necessary support in the form of routine descriptions, checklists, templates, etc. The consultants in the assignment planned all the work, kept the questions together, kept track of aspects not falling through the cracks, held all the workshops and conducted all interviews, as well as structured the description of the working method and ensured that the results were useful for implementation.

The result: Today, the authority has a clear and well-established process for On-Call Officer, where employees are satisfied, management has a clear overview and external stakeholders are aligned with where the authority's responsibility begins and ends in the event of a crisis.