All Hands Consulting Reviews 2011, Has Positive Outlook for 2012

Happy New Year's Eve everyone. I prepared the following as an update on AHC activities past, present and future.

All Hands Consulting (AHC) is ending another successful year: its twelfth since rebranding DavisLogic as All Hands in early 2000.  2012 will be the thirteenth year of operations for this unique emergency management consulting firm.  AHC is starting off the New Year with many exciting projects on the books.  The 2012 outlook is positive despite the sluggish economy and cut backs in homeland security grants.

Reflecting on 2011


This is the time of year to reflect on our past accomplishments and keys to success. We want to thank everyone who has been a part of All Hands including our consultants, clients and partners. Despite the recession, 2011 was a year of steady work for AHC. All Hands consultants kept busy working with many returning clients and a few new clients. Our client list has grown to over 150 while our team of consultants has climbed well past 1,000.

AHC supported planning, training and exercise (PT&E) projects across the USA, both as prime and as sub–contractors. We also provided supplemental staffing support to large firms in a variety of PT&E efforts.

Our contracts included several projects across the northern tier of states. We helped with comprehensive emergency management plans (CEMPs), and developed operational procedures, guidebooks and playbooks.  We supported several exercises, taught classes on incident command and Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC), and conducted multiple organizational and capabilities assessments and workshops in Butte, MT and Saint Paul, MN.

Back east, we supported the NY-NJ-CT-PA Regional Catastrophic Planning Team with both an Executive Catastrophic Playbook and a Best Practices for Large-Scale Evacuations document.  We also helped design Emergency Operation Centers (EOCs) in Georgia and Florida. We continue to do a lot of work in Florida, and have developed CEMP and Continuity of Operations (COOP) plans for Miami Dade College and tested the plans by conducting two exercises. We also supported Miami Beach with planning and exercises and started a project in Palm Beach.

On the west coast, 2011 saw the sixth Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) Conference that we supported. The 2011 conference was in San Francisco. All Hands President Steve Davis supported San Francisco as Planning Chief and organized the program for what was the largest conference ever.  This was the final year of transition to a non-profit organization which will now organize the conferences in the future. We also helped with EOC design services in Brookings, OR.

We are also supporting a state-wide assessment of schools using the Automated Critical Asset Management System (ACAMS).  AHC staff have been in the field collecting data through a series of site assessments.

In addition to the PT&E work, we did a couple of After Action Reports on real-world events and supported the response to the BP Oil Spill.  We have been maintaining a “ready reserve” cadre of disaster responders for support to FEMA’s Individual Assistance Technical Assistance program and other state and local deployment contracts.

Our efforts on disaster response during 2011 included catastrophic planning efforts, workshops and interviews as well as IMT staffing.  In addition, AHC supported several Business Continuity Plan projects for private sector organizations.

Social Media


We continue to be active in social media, and our presence and reach grew considerably during 2011.  Our long time efforts to communicate by e-mail continue.  For instance, our "Emergency Management Discussion" group has 2,372 members and has hosted over 20,000 messages.  We have fully embraced the use of Twitter where we are nearing 2,000 followers on our @AllHandsDotNet account.  We have integrated our Tweets with Facebook, and LinkedIn and our various web sites and we continue to blog about emergency management and the Urban Areas Security Initiative.

Our websites continue to lead the way in information sharing as evidenced by a total of over eight million hits this year across the enterprise of All Hands web sites.  Together, our various websites and social media outlets have put the All Hands Network at the forefront of social media based information sharing.

A Look Ahead to 2012


2012 appears to be promising with many new projects already on the schedule. We will be doing municipal and county CEMPs in Florida, Louisiana, and Wisconsin and elsewhere as well as designing and conducting a transit exercise in Florida and a federal COOP project in South Carolina.  Our on-going work in New York, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Montana, West Virginia, Louisiana and Florida should also continue during the year.  We hope to keep supporting other firms with PT&E projects as well as pursuing opportunities focused on hazard assessments, recovery planning, disaster response, supplemental staffing and other projects.  In addition, we are currently working on several opportunities (both foreign and domestic) to do Emergency Operations Center design, operational planning, training and exercise work.

Thanks again to every who is a part of All Hands and a part of our continued success.

Steve Davis

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