To provide effective performance metrics to measure the competencies of incident management personnel, a more definitive guide to complexity was needed. This version was developed to assist in defining complexity that permits performance metrics to be developed. This guide supports, and is supported by the document “Defining Standardized Performance Capability Metrics for Incident Management Teams Based on Resource Typing Levels” and the “3-Tiered Preparedness System for Type-3 Incident Management Teams” and, as will be described, is complimentary to all current NIMS doctrine.
This is an updated version of a draft that was vetted from numerous stakeholder groups represented on the original National Integration Center sponsored “Incident Management Support Group” during the 2009 to 2014 time-period. The completed 2014 document was delivered to the NIC and was subsequently included in the US Department of Interior’s Incident Management Implementation Guide with changes only to the title and categories.
To ensure that this 2021 document was complementary with existing training, doctrine, and supporting guidelines recently developed by the National Integration Center, the Emergency Management Institute, and the US Fire Administration, the following documents were reviewed.
- FEMA, NIMS National Qualification System.
- FEMA, NIMS 2017 refresh.
- 2019 versions of IS-100 and 200.
- 2019 versions of ICS-300 and ICS-400.
- May 2019 draft, NIMS Training Program.
This draft was edited to be complimentary with existing NIMS documentation while still benefiting from previous vetting from stakeholders.
In addition to ensuring that the characteristics included in this version were complementary to current doctrine, the following discipline focused complexity analysis tools currently in use were reviewed to see if any characteristics from those discipline focused tools reflected a more All-Hazards approach that could be included in the Guide. Some of the complexity analysis tools reviewed include:
- The National Wildfire Coordinating Group Fire Complexity Analysis (Rocky Mountain and Southwest Coordination Centers)
- The US Coast Guard’s Incident Complexity Analysis.
- The All-Hazards Incident Management Teams Association, 2016 version of the All-Hazards Complexity Analysis (withdrawn for revision in 2018).
- US Department of Interior’s Incident Management Implementation Guide.
- Several states including Washington and Texas.
A complexity guide is significantly more straight-forward than a complexity analysis tool and should not be confused with the latter. A complexity guide assists in defining the characteristics that should be used when developing a complexity analysis. A guide provides a set of characteristics or indicators that help the user understand what complexity may look like. In this particular Complexity Guide there are two sets of characteristics. They are divided into two broad categories, Incident Effect Indicators and Incident Management Indicators. These indicators vary in scale as the complexity of an incident increases or decreases. The difficulty in developing a broad-brush approach to a complexity analysis tool is that many factors could be considered jurisdictionally or situationally dependent. As an example, one often used but highly variable criteria is “number of responders.” The issue is that if you develop hard and fast numbers of responders into an assessment tool for all jurisdictions (i.e. a type-3 incident has 200 to 300 responders), it often becomes ineffective as a tool. As an example, Los Angeles County Fire Department deploys over 100 firefighters at the smell of smoke in a wildland area — on a first alarm. If a responder sees a fire, the response could be increased to 250 or more, and it is still well within a type-4 or 3 incident for them, and no-one is on-scene. They respond to several of these types of incidents in one day during the summer. If those numbers were used as the baseline, in many areas of the country that is more responders than all the departments have combined and would strip a region. To them, that many responders would cause people to try and classify it as a Type-2 or Type-1 incident. As a result, developers must be very careful with those types of criteria or it be difficult to apply in many jurisdictions. In this version hard and fast numbers were avoided but were put in generalized categories to permit judgment calls. In addition, items like the number of responders were used with the caveat that it was dependent on the kind of incident.