Rapid Damage Assessment: Building for the Real Process

Accela launched Rapid Damage Assessment in 2022 to help agencies document damage after natural disasters; in 2023 we expanded it with new geospatial and mobile capabilities. My job was discovery: understand the post-disaster workflow well enough to turn it into requirements.

In an interview, I asked a county emergency coordinator a standard question: walk me through your process after a natural disaster. She paused and said: "Which part? The official one, or the one that actually happens?"

The documented process assumed connectivity, complete data, and sequential steps. The real one had paper backups when cell towers were down, field crews improvising triage order, and information flowing through whoever happened to be reachable.

We reoriented discovery around that reality. The requirements that mattered weren't the ones that digitized the official flowchart — they were the ones that survived a real disaster: offline-capable field data collection, geographic context that works without a live connection, and records that reconcile cleanly once connectivity returns. That's what made Esri Survey123 integration the right backbone for field collection.

The expansion shipped with the field workflows agencies actually run, not the ones their manuals describe. My contribution was the translation layer: interviews to workflows to requirements to cross-functional delivery alongside engineering and services.

The durable lesson: in high-trust domains, the documented process is a compliance artifact. Discovery's job is to find the process that actually happens — and build for that one. I've asked some version of "the official process, or the real one?" in every discovery conversation since.