Welcome New Projects Manager

 For Immediate Release

Contact: Jill Filer

Internal Sales and Marketing Manager

jillfiler@thebluecell.com

August 29th, 2023

Denver— August 29th, 2023 — 

This week The Blue Cell is celebrating its continued success and is proud to announce the addition of Dawna Whitcomb as our new Projects Manager who will be joining our Team September 11th. Dawna was a member of a county level Emergency Management team in the Midwest with over a decade of experience.  She is also formerly the most recent past President of the Nebraska Association of  Emergency Management.  As The Blue Cells Project Manager Dawna will round out the company’s day-to-day management team that consists of Jill Filer, Sales and Marketing Manager and Zach Manns, Technical Services Manager.  Founding Owner/Managing Partner, Todd Manns was quoted as saying “our new team and organizational approach is designed to take the company into the future and into new areas of service delivery leaving some of the old Baby Boomer concepts behind. From an experience perspective we are holding on to those capabilities and are intentionally housing them directly in our primary instructor/facilitators positions which are geographically dispersed on the East coast, West coast, and Midwest/Rockies subcontractor ranks, but for day-to-day effectiveness a big change was appropriate.”

Dawna brings a specific expertise in the understanding and knowledge of grant processes and procedures, understanding the actual rules vs. the ones that are routinely made up on the fly by some in authority and will project a confidence and steady professionalism while speaking truth to power.  She is a subject matter expert with regards to all manner of Homeland Security Granting.  In her Projects Manager position with The Blue Cell, she will touch every project that comes through The Blue Cell, LLCs door from the time of acquisition to the final billing event. Dawna will also be the company lead on all Federal programming interfaces ensuring those rules are adhered to by our various clients, contacts and pass-through entities.

Having  her join as a member of our team is truly humbling as we are very aware that several other organizations recruited her heavily. 

The Blue Cell is a by design international training and exercise services company focusing on crisis and consequence management in the public and private sectors emerging in 2020 as the most active company in the world in the emergency management in-person, virtual and hybrid training space. 

The Blue Cell, as it approaches its 15th year has a renewed focus on service delivery and contract execution with a new group of high-profile Federal, Local, and Private Sector clients.

For more information contact Jill Filer, Sales and Marketing Manager. Find us at www.thebluecell.com, www.thenimsstore.com or at 800-866-0840 x 3.

"Crisis Suite"- Only In The Movies ?

 The concept of the “crisis suite” has always been intriguing. Made popular by big budget action and political film franchises such as Mission Impossible, Jason Bourne and of course Bond, James Bond- 007, the concept of a key group of government and military officials in a room with complete integrated comms, lightning fast computers, unlimited information access abilities including CCTV cameras on anything needed and of course displayed on giant screen displays is certainly breathtaking.

Operations Centers now of many flavors (Emergency Operations Center (EOC’s), Department Operations Centers (DOC’s), Joint Operations Centers (JOC’s) appear to aspire to Hollywood’s high mark. Certainly, this is easier said than done. In the movies of course everything works great. Conversations, verbal orders, and replies are crisp and to the point. Everyone is logged in when the scene starts (not struggling to remember a password or needing to call downtown to get IT to help) and the basics of activation are smooth and seamless. Also, everything seems to be working all of the time with agency administrator types intimately familiar with the systems, processes and how to effectively contribute and play their roles.

Utopian at best, but definitely a model to strive for.

A few takeaways as we apply it the “real world”:

Ease of usage is aways a key consideration, particularly under the duress of an incident. The implied position in the movies is that the minions sitting at the terminals in the crisis suites, sit at those terminals every day. In the real-world using software that one is significantly familiar with can be make or break. I simply love Microsoft because I have grown up on it. Under duress it’s the software packaging that I’m going to be most effective at using.

Web based solutions not requiring elaborate sign in procedures are another stumbling block. Finding a happy medium between total lockdown and being able to get the Public Works Director and the Commissioners logged in is an all-important factor. Systems like VEOCI are a possible high viability solution.

Making the Operations Center purpose built. The mission seems to drive the action in the movie crisis centers. Everyone seems to get why they are there and what they are expected to do. Recently in Colorado a client of my firm was activating for an annual planned summer event only to find out that a particular discipline had their own command center, doing consequence management and calling it an ICP. In a very recent situation (2 days ago) The City and County of Denver, under the direction of a newly sworn in Mayor activated its City EOC for the ongoing homeless situation in the City, a key campaign issue and a first.

Our issues are complex, our representative form of government is complex and how we deal with “emergency or disaster” situations are complex. This may be unavoidable, but Hollywood’s images should give us optimism of how things could be with a little thought process, creativity, and a lot of effort.     

FEMA EOC Quick-Reference-Guide Virtual Considerations

Franchising in the Emergency Services Field

 

It may sound a little crazy to apply the concepts of a sandwich shop, bowling alley or hair salon to the Emergency Services Field.

According to the International Franchises Association the first modern day franchisor was likely Martha Matilda Harper, a Canadian American who began to franchise the Harper Method Shops in 1891.  Headquartered in Rochester, N.Y., she included in her hair care franchise many of the elements we have come to expect in a modern commercial franchise system including initial and continuing training, branded products, field visits, advertising, group insurance and motivation.  Harper started her salon business in 1888 and grew the franchise system to more than 500 salons and training schools at its peak, with the last location closing in 1972. 

The definition of a franchise according to Oxford Language dictionary is:

“An authorization granted by a government or company to an individual or group enabling them to carry out specified commercial activities, e.g., providing a broadcasting service or acting as an agent for a company's products.”

So, if the need exists for a service or product and a business has the service or product available for consumption, then it can be franchised.

The Blue Cell, LLC which began in 2009 operated for a number of years as a sole proprietor LLC primarily conducting training courses. As hundreds and eventually thousands of students attended our courses a small percentage began to inquire about exercise design and simulation. Over the next few years, a small internal exercise capability was created. In 2012 The Blue Cell, LLC acquired Command School TTX out of Lancaster, PA. The acquisition provided a substantial East coast / Midwest client list going back to 1989 and a lot of H.O. scale buildings, matchbox cars and vests. The acquisition also came with a full exercise archive, over 25 years in the making.

The archive studied, turned into intellectual property and re packaged in 2017 into the emerging Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation format focusing on three of the seven levels of exercise and made available for sale as TTX Vault.

In our current post global pandemic world, the need for exercise is greater than ever, attributed to the lost time due to the disease, the recognition of response and preparedness deficiencies and a work force in many cases that really does not want to work. These elements have created the perfect storm of opportunity.

In April 2023 The Blue Cell, LLC will present for purchase 10 geographic franchises that will be available for sale with over 200 pre-canned exercise products through an online store. The stores will have several adjoining products and services to support the exercise needs of government agencies (large and small), fixed facilities, private businesses, airports, hospitals, Colleges and Universities, large corporate campuses and more. Well on our way to success the International Franchise ( servicing Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Greece)  of TTX Vault has been reserved by a Canadian Emergency Services firm that will also act as a master franchise holder with significant input on product re-design, online presence, branding and new product development.

To learn more please contact Todd Manns, Founding Owner / Managing Partner- The Blue Cell, LLC. toddmanns@thebluecell.com

The Reality of Hybrid Training

If asked in 2019, do you think virtual and hybrid training would be an acceptable way to teach ICS 300 and ICS 400, I would have said “no way.”

At the end of that year the firm that I founded was very much still committed to traditional classroom training deliveries. We had acquired a training space east of Denver and had built it out with a main room, conference room and a few offices. One of those offices initially was designed to broadcast a podcast from. This was all in an effort to be more effective in our communication with key clients in the Rocky Mountain West and Alaska, and possibly start down the road of virtual live distance learning.

As Covid became a reality, so did the concept of how to deliver standard curriculums. Fast forward to 2023. The Blue Cell, LLC has now mastered the concepts of both VILT (virtual instructor lead training) and adding to that a live classroom. We are now being contracted to deliver not only ICS 300 and ICS 400 in a hybrid configuration, but also other courses and levels of exercise.

Through trial and error over the past few years, hundreds of deliveries and constantly looking to adjust and improve how to do it, we are now confident delivering any course in these advanced configurations.

Last week we found validation in our concepts with a delivery for a unique client. It wasn’t a Fortune 10 company, or the DOD, or a major jurisdiction.

The client was FEMA Region 8 Staff !

After 15 years in business this was the first time our minority and veteran owned business had ever been asked to do something directly by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Being only 15 miles as the crow flies from our offices we were honored to train and support with our broadcast from their offices on the west side of Denver.

The delivery itself ended up with 10 students in the classroom and 13 students online virtually. The course had tuning in participants from Montana, Department of Defense personnel, local FEMA personnel, FEMA IMAT members and the FBI.

Our primary platform, Microsoft Teams worked flawlessly and The Blue Cell, LLC team of instructors and techs did an amazing job.

The seamlessness’ of this delivery puts to bed once and for all can it be done, is it allowed, and how do you do it / what are best practices.

I am grateful for the talented team and equally talented and eager students and want to thank our strategic partner The Colorado Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management for their consistent support.  Check us out at www.thebluecell.com and www.thenimsstore.com.