Case study: State and local government
King County Metro strengthens emergency management with data-driven program evaluation
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King County Metro, one of the nation’s largest and fastest-growing metropolitan transit systems, needed to better understand its security and emergency management program’s current capabilities, strengths, and areas for improvement. The agency wanted to improve their day-to-day and emergency operations, align to best practices, and prepare for an expanded team footprint, all while maintaining excellent service delivery. As a result, King County Metro partnered with Eagle Hill to conduct an in-depth program evaluation of their security and emergency management program to make evidence-based decisions to guide future organizational development and change within their evolving environment.
Goal
Assess King County Metro’s security and emergency management programs to facilitate evidenced-based, data-driven decisions and action planning to enhance system security and emergency preparedness.
The client at a glance
Annual trips
Weekly riders
Daily riders across all modes
Fastest growing ridership in the country, 2024
Largest transit agency in the country
The challenge: Elevating metro transit emergency preparedness
King County Metro wanted to take their security and emergency management program to the next level. They recognized the need to be able to respond to security incidents efficiently and thoroughly – while also staying on top of emergency preparedness in a growing transit system. While already aligned to federal, state, and local regulatory requirements, the agency sought to explore and integrate transit best practices and team member and stakeholder feedback to identify areas for further improvement. Based on findings, King County wanted to create even stronger programs in response to expanding ridership. Additionally, they wanted to right-size workloads and staff to address increasing requirements.
Our approach: Data-driven program evaluation methods
Our program evaluation methods focused on rigorous data analysis and multi-dimensional objective evaluation – resulting in tailored recommendations tied back to the agency’s overarching goals. We:
Created tools to inform evidence-driven decisions. To ground our program evaluation in data and performance metrics, we conducted extensive data analysis, refinement, and translation. Assessing King County Metro’s work to industry best practices required heavy lifting to collect and structure data across multiple formats. To do this, we created tools that enabled us to quantify and analyze Metro’s strengths and areas for improvement, benchmarking against industry best practices.
Conducted stakeholder interviews. We interviewed and collected resources from team members, internal partners, and external stakeholders. Our interviews provided a complete picture of the agency’s workload, requirements, capacity, and an understanding of where the workforce was stretched too thin.
Comprehensively analyzed the agency’s existing capabilities. We used a well-recognized framework to structure our analysis and enable a comprehensive review of SEM’s core functions.
Eagle Hill’s successful engagement with King County Metro was not only due to our analytic skills and expertise in transportation and emergency management, but also due to how we approached the work. We:
Built trust and buy-in through close collaboration and application of change management principles. Throughout the engagement, we worked hand-in-hand with our client. We continuously validated our findings with them, leading to not only accurate and meaningful end results, but also preventing any unwelcome surprises. By keeping our client informed at every step, we generated excitement and momentum for developing and implementing action plans that reinforce strengths and address areas for improvement.
Focused on the agency’s specific needs when building recommendations, instead of an “off-the-shelf” solution. From the start of our engagement, we recognized that the agency had a unique composition of transportation modes, an unusually vast geographic area to cover, and specific agency goals. Building a full picture of the client’s situation through an in-depth current state analysis and close collaboration enabled us to provide tailored recommendations for our client’s needs.
Used actionable language in our findings to enable our clients to easily navigate the path forward. When reporting our findings, we knew the importance of communicating clearly and concisely. Our digestible findings and recommendations helped King County Metro quickly understand where to focus their efforts. Moreover, our findings not only provided recommendations, but also highlighted short- and long-term impacts and gave guidance on who within the organization would be best suited for implementation.
“Eagle Hill Consulting has been an invaluable partner to King County Metro, demonstrating a strong commitment to collaboration and excellence. Their expertise has helped position us as an industry leader by leveraging advanced tools such as data analytics, industry research, and best practices to drive meaningful change—from analysis to action planning and implementation.”
— King County Metro on Eagle Hill
Results: Strengthening metro transit emergency preparedness
Our multi-dimensional approach to evaluation led to the development of 17 recommendations, which we collaboratively addressed in action plans with all team members. Today, we continue to work with King County Metro to help them implement recommendations and assess outcomes, building a more secure and prepared future for the transit system’s hundreds of thousands daily riders who rely on a safe and secure system.
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