Contents

About OCTAVE ...........................................................................................3

OCTAVE – Easy to Use..............................................................................4

Design your emergency response organisation ..................................5

Emergency Organisation Reports ......................................................5

Training Administration..........................................................................6

People and Training ............................................................................7

Exercise Design and Scheduling...........................................................8

Optimise the Benefits from Emergency Planning.............................9

Automatically Plan, Assess and Report Emergency Exercises ..... 11

Competence Framework..................................................................... 12

Records of Individual Performance ................................................ 13

Performance in Exercises ................................................................ 14

Resources and Procedures ................................................................ 15

Procedure Performance................................................................... 15

Procedure Performance................................................................... 16

Improvement Plan................................................................................17

Demonstrate Compliance................................................................... 18

Professional Reporting ....................................................................... 18

� OCTO 2004 3

About OCTAVE

In every organisation, the work of planning and delivering emergency arrangements can be time consuming and costly. Making the best use of management time, capitalising on lessons learnt, and above all demonstrating to regulators the planning and depth of your training and exercising can be a headache.

OCTAVE is a free-standing software application which runs on all current Microsoft Office platforms.

It has six main functions:

1. Organisation Design

2. Training Administration

3. Exercise Design and Scheduling

4. Competence Framework

5. Resources and Procedures Management

6. Improvement Plan

Abou

t OC

TAVE

� OCTO 2004 4

OCTAVE – Easy to Use

OCTAVE is easy to use, but if required, we can also supply training for database management or tailor it to your specific requirements. OCTO can assist with the inputting of data, setting scenarios and producing competence standards.

OCTAVE is unique in its flexibility and can deliver many and varied benefits. It has been designed by emergency managers who understand the needs of management, trainers, and participants. The database is easy to maintain and can reduce costs and save considerable management time.

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� OCTO 2004 5

Design your emergency response organisation

Define the roles within your emergency organisation and allocate selected individuals.

�� Specify competence criteria, training requirements and exercise observation criteria for each emergency role.

�� Assign individual personnel to roles.

�� Report the state of preparedness of your emergency organisation.

Emergency Organisation Reports

�� Display a gap analysis of how many people are nominated or qualified to fulfil a role, compared with how many the organisation needs.

�� Display the level of redundancy built into the organisation – for instance is the emergency organisation built around an ‘A’ Team or is there sufficient strength in depth?

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� OCTO 2004 6

Training Administration

Define training requirements for each individual and administer the training plan for the entire response organisation.

�� Schedule training modules

�� Administer training modules

Comprehensive reporting suite:

�� Predict and budget for future training

�� Track individual and departmental needs

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� OCTO 2004 7

People and Training

OCTAVE facilitates easy and accurate tracking of individual training records and comparative performance.

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� OCTO 2004 8

Exercise Design and Scheduling

OCTAVE allows you, probably for the first time, to co-ordinate and control the wide variety of records on individuals, scenarios and indeed the entire exercise planning regime. You can plan attendance of key personnel at exercises, ensure consistency of opportunity and allocate specific training scenarios to specific individuals.

The exercise scheduler offers a “see at a glance” view of the exercise programme:

�� Schedule emergency exercises

�� Organise exercise planning meetings

�� Exemption reporting for personnel, procedures, resources and scenarios

�� Plan an exercise in detail

�� Comprehensive exercise reporting

In this ‘screen example’ the ability to record people who have not exercised between specified dates, allows the manager to programme future attendance of individuals. With OCTAVE, the database does the work not the manager.

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To ease the problem of ensuringthat all key personnel, procedures,resources and scenarios areexercised at an appropriatefrequency to an appropriate depthOCTAVE provides exemption reportsof those not exercised. Thesebecome candidates for the nextexercise programme

� OCTO 2004 9

Optimise the Benefits from Emergency Planning

OCTAVE offers a structured exercise planning framework covering:

�� Planning meetings

�� Scenarios

�� Resources

�� Procedures

�� Emergency roles

OCTAVE both plans the exercise and records the performance of every person and every resource involved. It even generates automatically exercise observation sheets and performance reports. OCTAVE is designed and tested by practitioners so as to ease rather than contribute to the administrative burden.

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� OCTO 2004 10

OCTAVE allows management to monitor to the entire exercise and training regime. Graphs and reports can be used in presentations to demonstrate the implementation of training and exercise plans and the capability and competence of people, resources and procedures.

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� OCTO 2004 11

Automatically Plan, Assess and Report Emergency Exercises

For any specified exercise, OCTAVE will generate automatically assessment sheets to guide each exercise observer. In addition individual performance in exercises can be scored and marks allocated according to your own company criteria.

The OCTAVE database gives management valuable information about the exercise, the performance of personnel. resources and procedures and the suitability of the scenario. This allows judgments to be made concerning future resource and procedure revisions as well as providing opportunities for other members of the emergency team to learn the lessons from a particular exercise.

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� OCTO 2004 12

Competence Framework

OCTAVE guides the establishment of a competence framework.

�� Formulate competence criteria for each emergency role

�� Deliver a sound and auditable competence framework

�� Monitor, review and revise standards

The act of formulating competence criteria can itself be illuminating and provide a sound basis for organisation improvement. OCTAVE can accommodate most existing competence frameworks or a suitable competence framework can be provided on request.

This is an optional module.

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� OCTO 2004 13

Records of Individual Performance

Within OCTAVE there is ample opportunity to keep precise records of individual performance. OCTAVE brings together;

�� training status and outstanding training requirements;

�� history of performance in exercises;

�� competence criteria

Competence criteria accommodate your own in-house standards. This can either form part of an appraisal process or can be used to identify training needs and to prepare comments to enable genuine and accurate feedback to the individual.

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� OCTO 2004 14

Performance in Exercises

The built-in exercise observation framework enables instant comparison of individual performance against a standard and against the peer group. Careful use of the framework can drive improvement, give the individual the opportunity to identify personal training needs and set realistic goals. With the assessment sheets you can track individual performance and give appropriate and accurate feedback.

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� OCTO 2004 15

Resources and Procedures

Maintain accurate and auditable records of resources and procedures.

�� Define key resources and procedures

�� Define performance standards

�� Build into exercise regime and track performance

The exercising of ‘kit’ is so often forgotten. OCTAVE can be used to demonstrate that the various elements of equipment are also being practised and lessons learned.

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� OCTO 2004 16

Procedure Performance

The ability to demonstrate that a full range of emergency procedures is exercised is equally important. Through OCTAVE, management can track the performance of emergency procedures, ensuring that standards are satisfactory and steady improvement is achieved.

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� OCTO 2004 17

Improvement Plan

Tracking improvements within the emergency response arrangements is simplified by OCTAVE’s built-in improvement plan.

�� Define improvements arising from performance in exercises.

�� Display improvement plan and monitor progress.

�� Print out management overview reports.

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� OCTO 2004 18

Demonstrate Compliance

An important element of delivering a complex emergency management system is the ability to demonstrate its effectiveness to a regulator. Although records are generally available, they are frequently found in diverse systems and require considerable cost in time and effort to collate when ‘the inspector calls’.

Professional Reporting

A simple click on the appropriate report provides information on a wide variety of topics.

OCTAVE holds all relevant records in one database and ensures that the process is easily accessed and auditable. OCTAVE can quickly be used to give the emergency organisation a health check, for instance, to demonstrate:

�� key organisational statistics

�� the content and timelines of the training being carried out

�� competence of individuals

�� status of exercise programme

�� status of resources, procedures and improvement programme

OCTAVE has great flexibility and in addition to the standard reports can readily be modified to produce customised reports.

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