A year ago August, Tim Bohdan emailed his extended family to tell them about a new work project. For the next 30 days, he wrote, he'd be working 12 hours a day, seven days a week. None of his family were surprised that Bohdan was working hard, but they were surprised by his new project: helping the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) shelter 300,000 refugees in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
A Louisiana native now living in Houston, Bohdan volunteered for the job after his employer, IBM, received a contract to help handle the crisis. It would prove to be one of the most emotional and exhausting experiences of his life, extending to 90 days and involving up to 105 hours of work a week. The FEMA Housing Project would also prove to be a virtual laboratory for the planning, organizing, and communication techniques he had learned at Tuck. Facing overwhelming disorganization when he arrived in Baton Rouge, Bohdan made a process map of the organizations involved in housing refugees. Creating a flow chart of roles and relationships was a skill he learned in Tuck's Business Process Re-engineering course. When he displayed the map, jaws went slack: it was five feet square, printed in six-point type with 1,000 activity blocks. "No one realized how Byzantine the FEMA process had become until I mapped it."
Another problem for Bohdan: when FEMA finally made trailers ready for occupancy, who would move into them? The first to sign up? The elderly? Those whose former homes were geographically closest? How do you figure who has the most need? Bohdan's answer: an algorithm.
It was something he'd experienced in his Tuck Decision Science course. "Professor Steve Powell would be proud to hear I used a spreadsheet model to solve a real-world problem." Bohdan started with a questionnaire asking refugees a handful of questions such as "How long have you been displaced?" "Do you have relatives with whom you can live?" and "Do you use a wheelchair?" Bohdan's computer algorithm was able to calculate who had the greatest need and which housing units would best suit them. He hopes that FEMA will continue to develop the tool for the future.
There was one housing solution that Bohdan solved sans spreadsheet: housing his mother, who evacuated her home in Lake Charles a month later during Hurricane Rita and joined him in his Baton Rouge hotel. "I delivered world-class housing services to at least one refugee," he laughs.
Drawing on what he learned in his Management Communication course, Bohdan prepared a daily report called "Progress of Evacuees Relocating Back to Louisiana and/or New Orleans." The Sunday version was used in the White House every Monday. "This was very gratifying, to know that the president and his cabinet were viewing my handiwork," Bohdan says.
He acknowledges the red tape that made FEMA so unpopular in the press. "We used to joke in the navy," he says, "that we cut red tape lengthwise to make it longer." Yet he is gratified to have been of service and feels good about the people he worked with. "There were some hard-working people down there who didn't get any glory." Would he do it again? "Of course," he says. "How many times do you get a chance to make a difference in the lives of thousands of people."
