Preventing Fire Setting Incidences by Children - Literature review Example

Managing Resources Name: Course: Name: Date: Managing Resources Having been appointed to implement a project that aims at improving fire safety awareness among children of primary school age, my first main responsibility before identifying the human resources management and resource management needs will be to establish the needs presented by the children. Borrowing some guidance from the “Strategy for Children and Young People: 2006-2010” which was released by the local government in 2006, it is clear that children are at an increased risk of dying or suffering serious injuries in fires due to carelessness or ignorance and they are also more likely to become involved in fire-related anti-social behaviour or fire crimes (Department for Children, Schools and Families, 2007). Having established this, it is therefore important that the intended project should address ways of engaging young children and their families in fire awareness activities. More so, the project should aim at preventing or reducing fire setting incidences or fire crimes by children, diverting children from fire-crimes and fire-related anti-social behaviour, educate them on the need to be responsible citizens in addition to equipping them with fire-safety skills. Human resource management As suggested by Devon County Council (2010, p. 5), the staff members trained to work with children in fire-and-rescue program should meet specific professional requirements in order to be effective when sensitizing the children about safety. They should also be able to identify and publicize good practice while working with the children. Recruiting the staff members required for this project will need a careful appraisal of the job applicants for the following human resource management principles: Comprehensiveness: The project will hire individuals which it can manage well. The two candidates must meet be able to comprehensively deal with all fire-safety issues that face children today. Since children’s ability to understand issues is not as developed as the adult’s, the two identified staff members must be patients and able to communicate effectively to the children. They must also have the ability to manage children well during training sessions in order Credibility: The staff members will be hired on the basis of their understanding and believe of laid down objectives and strategies. This will enhance their ability to pass the same convictions to the children they will be sensitizing about fire safety. More to this, children are learn a lot from observation and being attentive to behaviour, the two candidates must prove to the children that they can be trusted. In addition, the children must be willing to believe the illustrations offered by the two staff members during training sessions as true. Communication: Only employees with a proven ability of adopting open communication will be hired for this job. According to Price (2000) an open culture in any organisation enhances information sharing and hence makes the objectives of the organisation better understood by all. Control: In this regard, only employees whose performance can be consistent with the project objectives will be hired. Seeing that the employees will be required to handle children on a regular basis, they will need to prove that they can relate and communicate well with the children, while encouraging the children to attain the specified fire safety awareness objectives. Change: Since no child is similar to another, and different age groups will present the project with different challenges, the employees must be able to continuously improve their skills and knowledge about fire safety issues and handling different children in order to ensure that the project succeeds in its objectives. Cost-effectiveness: the two employees will receive fair competitive compensation for their work. Since they will be full-time employees, their remuneration will have to meet the minimal wage requirements in the UK and will also be awarded in accordance to comparable jobs held by other people elsewhere. Should the project need to recruit other employees in future, due consideration will be done in promoting or increasing the first two employee’s pay. This however will be done if the project has enough resources to warrant such an action, and if their performance on the job is good enough to warrant promotions or pay hikes. Competence: According to Price (2000), the competence of an organisation is mainly reliant on the individual competencies of its employees. In the project’s context, this means that the individual competencies of the two employees will establish whether the scheme will meet its objectives. To ensure that the objectives will be met in good time, the recruitment procedure will need to be stringent enough to allow only candidates who are competent for the job to get employment with the project. People in charge of recruitment should however remember to uphold the principles of diversity and equality as stipulated in the labour laws. Creativity: In profit-making organisations, creativity is used to give businesses a competitive edge through unique strategies (Price, 2000). Considering that children the fascination that children have with new and unfamiliar things, the two employees will need to be creative in order to not only catch the children’s attention during training, but also retain it. This will no doubt allow better understanding of the safety measures taught to them during training sessions. Coherence: According to Price (2000), coherence in human resource management is attained when initiatives and activities conducted by the employees in an organisation “form a meaningful whole”. This means that the two employees in the project must be capable of working with each other and other players in the project in order to compliment each other’s efforts. Commitment: As the project manager, I will have the responsibility of ensuring that the two employees are motivated enough to attain set project goals. As Price (2000) notes, motivating workers is the surest way of gaining employee commitment thus improving the chances of the organisation meeting set goals. Resources for the project Once the ideal staff members have been picked, the project will then evaluate the resources needed against the available budget. Some of the items that will be needed in this project include a house fire model and training books for the teachers. After training, the teachers will need to issue a fire prevention test to the children in order to test their understanding, and may also need to investigate specific communities where the children live for fire preparedness. Lessons will have to include teaching the children on how to identify fire, fire prevention, fire safety and evacuation. Since most children have little knowledge about fire, the two employees will also need to understand that fire knowledge passed to the children must be as basic as possible. For example, some of the children may not understand that matches and lighters can be a source of a much larger fire. This therefore means that the children need to understand the agents of fire comprehensively in order to avoid cases where they would be tempted to play with the same in future. In fire safety preparedness, the children will need to understand the importance of getting out of a burning building in good time. More so, they must understand the best routes to evacuate the building from. As such, the two employees must know that not all children recognise how to behave in case of a fire breakout. The first step towards sensitizing them should help them identify an exit sign. In lessons meant to help children identify the exit sign, the project employee need to have the visual images of the exit sign, they may also have a smoke detector, chalkboard, handouts, and when a mock-up exercise is necessary, the employees will need to carry a masking tape. Since most of these materials can be re-used, purchasing the same need not cost the project too much money. Procurement process Having identified the materials needed for the project, the person charged with implementing the same must then identify the stages to follow in the procurement process. If one is to follow a process such as the one used by Devon & Somerset Fire & Rescue Service (2010), this would mean that the requirements would be advertised, after which expressions of interest are vetted and the best awarded the tender to supply the requirement. To ensure that the supplier meets the specified criteria specified in the tender documents, performance and costs of the supplied items will need to be reviewed regularly. Management planning Based on Aquinas’ (2005, p. 105) analysis of the different levels of planning, the person in charge of implementing the plan for the project at hand will also be responsible for operational planning. This is similar to lower-level planning usually done by first-line managers in larger organisations. In this case however, the person charged with implementing the program will be in charge of planning the activities to be undertaken by the two employees in his department. The activities can be scheduled to take place either on a daily, weekly or monthly basis depending on the availability of children. During holidays for example, the project can work with communities and mobilise children for daily training. When the children resume school after the holidays, the project employees can approach the school administrations in the target areas with a view of training children about fire safety in the school. Considering that most activities for the two employees will be repetitive while addressing different children in different forums, it is also the responsibility of the person charged with implementing the project, to devise ways that will ensure that the two employees under his directions do not grow too complacent in their job and that they keep gaining new methods of passing on knowledge to their children audience. For effective management to occur however, it is noteworthy that the objectives of the project must be well articulated. According to Aquinas (2005), objectives are the “goals which an organisation tries to achieve... they are the end-points of planning” (p. 105). If this description is anything to go by, then management in the project at hand should be guided by four main objectives, which include: reducing fire setting incidences or fire crimes by children; diverting children from fire-crimes and fire-related anti-social behaviour; educating children on the need to be responsible citizens; and equipping children with fire-safety skills. With the above named objectives in place, the person charged with implementing the project can then organise, direct and controls the activities of the project with a specific aim in mind. As suggested by Aquinas (2005, p. 158), the aims and objectives articulated at the beginning of the project can also be used as a benchmark to measure the performance of the project. Operational assurance and evaluation A review of the project at hand reveals that in-depth, deliberate and time-critical risk management approaches would need to be applied at different levels of the project. Before commencing the project, an in-depth risk management, which includes training the employees, laying down the instructions and procedures to be followed while reaching out to the young children about fire and safety as well as acquiring the needed equipment to make the project successful, would have to be taken (Communities and local government 2009). Upon the implementation of the project, deliberate risk-management, such as performance review; safety briefs; quality assurance and on the job training would also need to be done. Time-critical risk management is also essential during the execution of the project especially considering that some resources such as budgetary allocations and human capital will need to be used effectively. According to the Institute of Operational Risk (2009), a company or organisation will set its risk thresholds as either ‘acceptable’, ‘tolerable’ or simply ‘unacceptable’. The first two are attained used when the losses can be sustained within normal budgetary allocation or where the losses are insurable through other benefits. Since equipping children with fire safety knowledge is a not-for-profit initiative within a fire department, risk thresholds can only be known after evaluation of the project performance has been evaluated. Acceptable performance where children have become absolutely of fairly knowledgeable about vital fire safety issues can be rated within the acceptable or tolerable limits. However, where a high percentage of children who have undergone sensitization on fire safety have limited knowledge on vital safety issues, then the budgetary allocation spent on the project would not be justified by the performance results and would therefore be rated as unacceptable Evaluating the project For effective management of the project to occur, it’s noteworthy that the project manager will need to work with his subordinates in a process whereby they will jointly agree on specific goals, targets and activities, which they should pursue either as individual project members or jointly as a team in order to achieve the overall objectives. Either way, this management system will need each of the employees to have a specific area of responsibility, and specific desirable results which should be evident in the targeted children population. The performance can then be evaluated based on his or her ability to live up to their responsibilities, and results as seen in the children’s understanding and appreciation of fire and safety procedures. Through investigating and appraising the results of the project, the manager is then able to identify the reasons behind the low or high performance and can also use the findings attained in the investigations to develop other goals, objectives or strategies to be implemented in future in order to improve the projects performance as suggested by Compton & Granito (2002). Through refining, modifying and improving goals, the project would be able to acquire a dynamic feature that will allow the manager and his subordinates to cooperate and participate in a joint endeavour of making the project a success in future. Where need be, Aquinas (2005, p. 110) proposes the sub-division of the main project goals in to more distinct short-term sub-goals. According to him, the sub-goals are more effective in informing individual employees of the specific expectations placed on them. Knowing what is expected of them then motivates the employees to focus more on the targets hence improving the overall performance of the project. To avoid placing too much burden on individual employees however, Aquinas (2005) suggests that all employees must be given a chance to participate in decisions meant to chart new performance targets through “free, frank and active-participation” forums (p. 111). Conclusion Managing resources in any fire department calls for effective managerial skills however small a project or department may be. This is because the manager has to consider the financial, physical and human resources availed to him against the set objectives. More to this, a person charged with such responsibility would have to understand the applicable managerial and financial principals as well as the procurement processes that need to be followed. Overall however, the main responsibility lies in balancing all the resources and helping the subordinate staff working under him to deliver on the key goals and objectives identified in the initial stages of the project planning and development. In this essays’ case, that would have to make young children more knowledgeable about fire safety, which would in turn help in preventing or reducing fire setting incidences or fire crimes by children; diverting children from fire-crimes and fire-related anti-social behaviour; educating children on the need to be responsible citizens; and equipping children with fire-safety skills. References Aquinas, P. G 2005, Principles of Management, Anmol Publications PVT Ltd., New Delhi. Communities and local government 2009, National procurement strategy for the fire and rescue service in England 2009-12. Compton, D. & Granito, J 2002, Managing Fire and rescue Services, ICMA University by the International City/County Management Association, Washington DC. Department for Children, Schools and Families (2007) The children's plan: building brighter futures. London: Department for Children, Schools and Families Devon & Somerset Fire & Rescue Service 2010, Procurement process, Viewed 17 July 2010, < http://www.dsfire.gov.uk/DevonFire/AboutUs/Supplying+Goods+and+Services/Procurement+Process.htm> Devon County Council 2009, Preventing unintentional injuries to children and young people in Devon 2009-2010, viewed 17 July 2010, < http://www.devonpct.nhs.uk/documents/Unintentional%20injuries%20among%20children%20and%20young%20people%20aged%20under%2019.pdf> Price, A 2000, Principles of Human resource management: an active learning approach, Wiley-Blackwell, London. The Institute of Operational Risk, 2009, Sound Practice Guidance, Viewed 17 July 2010, < http://www.ior-institute.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=101&Itemid=99> Read More