Conducting practice exercises is one of the most critical elements of an effective business continuity management program. However, its importance is still often underestimated. Exercise participants and planners alike can sometimes feel like they are simply checking a box to keep auditors satisfied. When exercises are only viewed this way, their true value is lost.
While they do fulfill compliance requirements, exercises are not simply activities that should be done—they are the best way to ensure your incident team structure is suitable, the results from your business impact analysis are accurate and your business continuity strategies and plans are valid.
Most organizations start with plan walk-throughs and tabletop exercises, and these are highly effective methods of assessing business continuity capabilities and organizational resilience. They provide an ideal means of engaging different levels of teams throughout an organization and testing plans and response structures. They can also involve a deep dive into some of the key risks the organization faces. However, one notable shortcoming is that teams may experience exercise fatigue. Running a similarly structured tabletop or walk-through exercise year after year can feel repetitive, and results are not always as strong as they should be.
If an incident team is experienced enough, the next step to further drive resilience is participating in a simulated exercise. This term can mean different things to different people, but the most important distinction is that the exercise moves beyond a discussion-based tabletop as the simulated exercise injects urgency and realism to the scenario by challenging the team to react and make decisions as they would in a genuine crisis.
How Do You Plan and Structure a Simulated Exercise?
A simulated exercise requires careful planning to bring together an exercise team that can develop a storyboard and produce the required elements of the exercise. At the outset, it is key to identify all the participants—observers, role-players and facilitators—and confirm the availability of senior leaders as their involvement is crucial.
The simulated exercise can be based on the initial stages of an incident, can start part of the way through the response or can include multiple stages using time jumps to focus on different response phases. Such time jumps can be useful, but they rely on assumptions about how people or teams would have acted in the intervening periods. It is important to account for this during planning so skipped periods do not leave gaps in preparation or understanding.
The scenario itself can be based on any risk pertinent to the organization, identified through the risk assessment as part of the business impact analysis process.
When planning, there are four key factors to consider. Each of these elements contributes to making the exercise credible and valuable, so the lessons learned carry through to real-world incidents:
- Create realistic pressure and urgency
It is important to bring the team together and have them work through a series of prompts delivered through phone calls, emails, media stories and social media posts to replicate the pace of a real incident. This allows them to feel the weight of time pressure and act as if the scenario were real. Role-players can add further realism to the scenario by having a genuine understanding of the organization and being able to react to the unfolding situation. Role-players also know exactly what buttons to push and can target areas of the business that truly need to be challenged.
- Configure the optimal team
It is best to conduct an exercise with one team at a time. Having too many participants in the room can create delays in decision-making and lead to less effective exercise outcomes. This is not to say other teams cannot be involved, but they should only be called in at specific points during the exercise when their expertise is required. Subject-matter experts, for example, may not be involved in actual incident team meetings, but their experience and expertise will be vital to gaining an understanding of the scenario at play.
- Design realistic response structures
The structure of the simulated exercise should mirror how the organization would operate during a real crisis, ensuring that the team understands the exact requirements of the incident response. Where possible, the exercise should take place in the same location a real response would be managed, such as a boardroom or control center. However, it is also important to consider the reality of where staff are based. A hybrid format can be considered as this represents a more likely response, albeit one that is more difficult to manage for exercise purposes.
- Maintain authenticity
It is important to treat the exercise as if it were a real event by having the actual response team at the table. To provide a greater level of authenticity, the organization can also invite key suppliers, auditors, safety officers, PR companies or whoever else may play a role in the response to a major incident. This can ultimately help to build an even greater level of resilience by understanding how the different parties will work together in a safe environment. If aspects of the response need adjustment, it is better to find out in a simulated exercise than during a real-life crisis.
Ensuring a Simulated Exercise is Effective
When the simulated exercise concludes, the team should feel as though they have been involved in a real incident that has provided the opportunity to discover gaps and areas requiring improvement, test decision-making under pressure and improve coordination. A well-run exercise does not just measure performance, it also builds confidence and helps embed continuity best practices throughout the organization.
A simulated exercise provides an opportunity for organizations to take business continuity beyond a stale, compliance activity. It helps turn exercises into a meaningful experience that changes how teams think, decide and act under pressure. By simulating the reality of a crisis, a simulated exercise exposes weaknesses while giving teams the practice and confidence they need to face the next real incident, further enhancing the organization’s resilience.