Community-Driven Strategic Planning Facilitation
The Technical Advisor Program provides teams of experienced technical advisors to professionally facilitate an agency's five-year strategic plan, driven by input from the community's external stakeholders. This facilitation includes a CPSE-led external stakeholder meeting (or meetings, at the agency's request), which gathers the structured feedback necessary for the agency to identify and determine the relative importance of community expectations, concerns, and priorities.
CPSE technical advisors then facilitate a three-day work session of the agency's internal stakeholders to integrate the community feedback into their mission, vision, and values. They also use community input in their analysis of organizational strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to determine the agency's critical issues and service gaps. This work results in solution statements that are transformed into goals, objectives, critical tasks, and performance measures.
Standards of Cover Facilitation
Experienced technical advisors also can provide four days of detailed instruction from the 5th edition of the CFAI Standards of Cover, in compliance with all applicable accreditation performance indicators, core competencies, and criteria.
Facilitation continues with online conferences and meetings to review and assist the agency with the methodology for documenting community hazards and risks. Advisors also provide coaching in the design layout and content of materials, using GIS mapping and data analysis.
The standards of cover facilitation helps agencies determine through a threat-based evaluation whether fire station location/distribution is adequate to provide timely response to the community's unique hazards, risks, population densities, and event demands. It also provides for an evaluation of the community's concentration and quality of forces to determine whether an "effective response force" is being sent to mitigate the emergency events. This "effective response force" evaluation is a capability-based review where emergency event critical tasking, equipment needs, as well as benchmark and baseline emergency response performance measurement occurs.
Full Self-Assessment Facilitation
This facilitation involves "all-combined" self-assessment work on core program components. A team of six to nine technical advisors facilitates the development of a strategic plan and a Standards of Cover (SOC) document. The team also provides the necessary instruction, coaching, and review of the agency's writing to the CFAI categories, criterion, core competencies, and performance indicators of the Fire and Emergency Service Self-Assessment Manual (FESSAM), including a detailed review of the FESSAM content and required exhibits.
The team of technical advisors coaches the agency on putting its accreditation team in place. This facilitation work closes with a multi-day mock site visit and report identifying the agency's readiness for "candidate agency" status with CFAI.