Checklists

OpsCenter Checklists

OpsCenter allows the creation and maintenance of checklists that reflect the way your organization responds to emergencies. Your organization can create, edit, or delete OpsCenter’s checklists to establish a set of checklists that are familiar. These will reflect your unique situation, needs, and terminology.

Familiar checklists in OpsCenter make it easier for users to learn the system and track their responsibilities to manage and control an incident. Checklists reflect your specific steps for responders to follow, such as those outlined in your emergency plans.

OpsCenter tracks the progress of checklists by individual or section and a time-date stamp. Several users can work from the same checklist and each can enter the status of different items.

For each task, the system can show which individual or role is responsible for completion of that task. Alert recommends assigning tasks to roles rather than individuals due to the dynamic nature of staffing during emergencies and shift changes.

Administering Checklists

The system provides a Checklist Administration Screen that allows an authorized, non-technical, user to:

• Create, delete, or modify a checklist. The intuitive interface is easy to use and further allows your organization to focus on response to an emergency rather than configuring software.
• Rearrange tasks in a checklist; group tasks by role, section, timeframe or some other fashion. Modifications to checklists may be driven by lessons learned from a real emergency, exercise, or planning session. The easy to use administration screen allows quick integration of lessons learned and best practices.
• Place labels in checklists to clarify how to use it. For example, labels may include instructions or references for some particularly difficult or unique tasks.

Checklists are tightly integrated with the rest of the system. For example:

• Each copy of the checklist in the system will reflect its related incident if the checklist is incident specific. Many organizations maintain different checklists for each type of incident they anticipate.
• OpsCenter’s notification functionality can trigger notifications when a checklist item is complete or overdue.
• OpsCenter’s journal functionality can capture who completed a task and when, plus maintain the information for historical purposes.
• The checklists will stay in OpsCenter for historical purposes until specifically deleted. Typically, organizations do not provide delete privileges to end users so that only an administrator can delete a checklist.