[MRIC] Re: ICS-213 message form

[Fred K3CSX]

The following is feedback from one of our DRO's that I wanted to share
with the group.  It was written just before the most recent version was
distributed by Al W3YRS on 4/17.

73, Fred.

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It's always an uphill battle getting people to completely fill out 
message forms, and in my experience, a losing battle. But that doesn't 
mean that we shouldn't try. A well-designed form will facilitate 
compliance; a poorly-designed form will discourage compliance.

1.  It is hard to get people to record the ICS position of the 
sender/addressee. That is vital in a long-term event, because the person 
occupying a given position will change over time, and you may have 
people from other agencies rotating into positions so the name is not 
easily recognized. You need to have the ICS position or title to 
interpret and respond to the message. Having a separate block for that 
information makes it more obvious that the form hasn't been completely 
filled out.

2.  Having the reply on the same message form works if the message is 
hand-delivered (e.g., within the EOC), where the recipient can scribble 
the response on the bottom of the form and send it back. If the message 
is to be transmitted via radio, the reply is a completely separate 
transaction, and should be recorded on a separate form. It helps to 
include a field in the message header: "In reference to message number 
xx."  This helps to sort the messages for post-exercise analysis.

3.  Assuring unique message serial numbers is difficult when multiple 
communications channels are flowing. One solution is to use forms that 
are pre-serialized. A more general solution is to use a date-time stamp. 
Neiter of these approaches work particularly well. See below for a third 
approach that works marginally better.

4.  If you use a separate form for replies (as recommended above), is 
provides more space at the bottom of the form for recording tracking 
information. In addition to knowing the date and time the message was 
created, it helps to document how the message was routed (via courier, 
RACES 2M/440, telephone, etc.), who the message was delivered to 
(addressee, relay station, etc.), and the time of delivery. 

5.  Date format of yyyymmdd is more conducive to automated sorting---
useful for post-exercise analysis. However, if they manage to write the 
date and time in any legible format, I'd be ecstatic. It needs to be 
clear whether you are talking about the time of origination, time of 
transmission, or time of delivery. All are important.

6.  I have participated in numerous debates about the wisdom of a 
including a field for message precedence on the form. Everyone thinks 
their messsage is urgent, Moreover, since they don't necessarily know 
what messages other folks are sending at any given point in time, so 
they don't have a basis for deciding the relative importance of their 
message relative to the others. 

Message precedence is only important when there is a backlog of messages 
waiting to be processed. What works better in that situation, I think, 
is to leave precedence off the form and assign a communications officer 
who is familiar with the operation to look at all pending messages and 
queue them for transmission. If the radio operator is experienced 
enough, they can do this job. If the radio operator doesn't have the big 
picture, this should be a separate assignment. 

My philosophy, when there is a backlog, is first in/first out, unless 
there is a message of obvious importance that needs to be placed at the 
front of the queue. Otherwise, the lowest precedence messages can 
languish for very long periods of time. If the backlog becomes severe, 
the communcations officer had best be arranging for an additional 
communications path, rather than wasting time juggling messages.

7. You don't need the name of the incident on the form. Sure, there 
could be a situation where we are running two incidents simultaneously. 
It should be pretty obvious what incident is being referred to, and you 
don't want to give people writer's cramp. If it's not obvious, the 
message isn't very well-written.

8. The subject line is a nice feature, but with hand-written messages, 
generally unnecessary. In email, it is possible to sort messages by 
subject, a handy feature to quickly pick out all the messages in a 
thread. Also, with email, you can look down a list of message subjects 
and pick out the ones that are most "interesting" (ignoring the rest, of 
course!). For hand-written messages, having a separate subject line 
contributes to writer's cramp and slows down transmission.

9. I like the idea of having a check box to indicate when the message is 
an exercise message. This helps to remind the radio operator to say, 
"This is an exercise message." I vividly recall an exercise where 
someone (fortunately, not one of the hams) transmitted a message 
reporting fatalities without indicating that this was an exercise 
message, generating a half-dozen calls to 911 from people with scanners 
wanting to know if they needed to take cover. (Unfortunately, no one had 
told the call-takers that there was an exercise going on, so they were 
pretty freaked out until a supervisor sorted things out.)


Attached is a format meeting most of the criteria discussed above. This 
image was from the 1987 edition of the Montgomery County RACES/ARES 
manual. We (RACES) helped MCEM design the form. It had just enough 
information to be able to tell what happened, without being unduly 
burdensome for users. The County went to a commercial printer who 
printed a large quantity of message pads with 2-part carbonless copies. 
The originator kept a copy, and the recipient or radio operator retained 
the original after disposition. 

Note that the radio operator assigned the message number and also 
recorded the path (e.g., 2M, 800 MHz, etc). Messages that were hand-
delivered don't require a message number. The stack of originals (for 
messages sent) and copies (for messages received) at a given radio 
position constituted the log of messages handled by that position. There 
was no need to create a separate log. At the end of the incident, all 
message forms were collected for subsequent analysis. Beause the 
operator initialed the form, if you had a question about the disposition 
of a given message, you would know who to ask for clarification.

This form was more successful than most I worked with, because it was 
simple and easy, but fairly comprehensive. Transmission was facilitated 
because the message structure was standardized. We decided not to 
include the message check field because virtually all of our message 
traffic was on full-quieting FM channels. 

In real incidents, we didn't use very many message forms, because we 
always tried to arrange it so that we could hand the mic to the 
operations person at each end and let them talk directly to each other. 
It was always our goal to get out of the message business and be a 
switchboard instead (plugging people together who need to communicate). 
The forms were used mostly for taking messages when one of the parties 
couldn't be reached.

In the real world, most communications are too complex to reduced to two 
or three sentences on a form. There needs to be a discussion to explain 
the background and the nuances of whatever issue is being addressed, and 
ideally, some give and take between the parties. 

Fortunately, real disasters evolve over a period of hours or days. 
You're not trying to cram the whole enchilada into a two-hour exercise, 
so there is time for the operator to find the person you need to talk to 
and bring them to the radio, or better yet, bring the radio to them.

If the person isn't available to talk and you need to leave a message, 
there is usually an aide, or pehaps someone who sits next to the person 
in the EOC, who has some understanding of context. So you don't need to 
write the message down verbatim in that situation. You simply say, 
"Please tell Janet blah, blah, blah," and they write down the salient 
information.

Formal written traffic is only required in those instances where the 
messenger lacks the experience and/or context to correctly relay the 
message, and you need to spell it out precisely. That's actually a 
fairly unusual situation in disaster response---but it's exactly that 
situation that requires the form we are talking about.
________________________________________________________________________

        Fred Bader (K3CSX)                 Post Office Box 2993
      mailto:k3csx at arrl.net             Gaithersburg, MD 20886-2993
         ARRL Life Member                Montgomery County (FM-19)