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Case Study Update #2: Rosa County Public Safety System Upgrade  

It was not a good way to start the year: over the New Year weekend, a three-year old had been taken from his home during a domestic dispute by a parent – against whom a restraining order had already been filed – who came by the house Friday night, armed and angry about custody papers filed earlier in the day. Although an emergency call was placed by a neighbor after shots were heard shortly after 10 p.m., police did not arrive at the residence until nearly 30 minutes later, delayed by an address incorrectly recorded as “18th Street” when the house was several miles away on “18th Avenue”. Worse still, the shots quickly attracted the attention of the media, who arrived on the scene prior to police officers and subsequently noted several squad cars were not far from the area and could have easily arrived sooner. Fortunately, no one was hurt and the little boy was voluntarily returned home early the next morning after a few hours of negotiations when the police located the abductor and the boy in an apartment nearby, but public criticism of the police department remained high. In the meantime, call center personnel – dispatchers and call takers – took the events of the past weekend extremely hard. Uniformed personnel at the nearby police and fire station who supported the call center that weekend as additional duty were upset with call center personnel. Those personnel, who were all civilians, just didn’t seem to understand the mistake made at the center made the officers responding to the incident look bad, through no fault of their own. The regular civilian call center staff, on the other hand, felt no one realized how much call volume had increased in the last year, with no additional support provided other than part-time ad hoc uniformed support that hadn’t really been trained in call center processes and weren’t stationed onsite anyway. The two or three civilians who had been in the center a long time – more than three years or so (turnover tended to be high) – were especially frazzled, as everyone seemed to look to them to keep things together and the current center was a disorganized mess of paperwork and people. Everyone was looking forward to “anything new” that might help the situation, although no one really knew the details of what was to come…just that a new system and call center structure was supposedly on its way. Alex Jensen, an Operations Manager within the Rosa County police department and the designated “overseer” of the public safety dispatch system upgrade that was very publicly promised to improve emergency call response time, had been following the story most of the weekend and felt more than a little pressure when he returned to work on Tuesday. He knew the upgrade project needed, in some way, to respond to the past weekend’s events. He also sensed he needed to get more engaged with the system upgrade vendor, OnCall Systems, but he also wanted to have the right information before going in to any additional planning sessions. With OnCall already working with the County to develop plans for reconfiguring the police department’s communications area and with a few of their technical personnel already onsite a few days each week, Alex knew he didn’t have much time before the project pathway would be increasingly difficult (and more expensive) to change – he was behind. He’d already briefly met once with Paul Spires, OnCall’s manager for the system upgrade project. It was a good meeting with the two getting along well, but Alex still felt he didn’t know much about OnCall and what he could expect from them. He wasn’t involved in the vendor selection process and hadn’t attended OnCall’s initial product demonstration. To learn more about OnCall, Alex checked in with a friend of his working in the City Attorney’s office as a contract administrator, Lyn Campbell. Lyn pulled the sole source contract with OnCall and together she and Alex reviewed the contract conditions. In addition to the standard County invoice and payment schedule (net 30 days), the contract also called for penalties for late delivery or “unacceptable” product quality, but

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left determination of detailed delivery dates or “acceptable” product quality open until project parameters and schedule were determined in the post-award project planning process. Other than the County’s general contract terms, there weren’t many other contract conditions, and of these several were of a technical nature beyond which either Alex or Lyn understood. Alex realized he would need some technical help and, while Paul Spires had been open and answered all of Alex’s questions, Alex wanted someone with the County’s interest unquestionably in mind. He didn’t know who might be able to help him internally, but added the research item to his to-do list, and considered the possibility he might need to either hire someone or seek outside support. The cost of the system upgrade and physical center configuration had already caused some “sticker shock” in the County, but he thought maybe the events of the past weekend might help him find additional resources. Alex had heard all the latest news by Wednesday morning, and knew he needed to do something soon, as the project was already moving forward: the call center floor plan design had already been approved and OnCall’s general contracting subcontractor was to begin work to physically change the room layout in four weeks. The reconfiguration would be the first significant change to the County’s current way of doing business and Alex was concerned about potential disruption to call taker and dispatcher activities. Perhaps it was time to ask OnCall, their general subcontractor (Superior Construction, Inc) and at least one representative from the Police Department – to sit down together and not only review the existing upgrade and call center plan but also see if they could find a way for the project to respond to some of the problems the past weekend’s events had identified. At least things were moving forward and the schedule and budget seemed to be going as planned. “Well, as far as I know,” he thought.