Types of Business Continuity and Crisis Management Exercises

Best practice dictates that Business Continuity (BC) plans should be regularly exercised, with findings integrated into the Business Continuity Management System. Continuous improvement in BC practices can be achieved through various types of exercises designed to address specific areas of the BC plan, verify recovery solutions, raise awareness, and train participants. Depending on the exercise objectives, one type of exercise may be more suitable than another.

It's crucial to understand that a business continuity exercise is not a pass/fail test. Instead, it is an opportunity to uncover learnings and continuous improvement that will enhance your BC plan. Objectives may include validating the Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), assessing the capability of recovery strategies, ensuring response teams understand their roles, and demonstrating the impact of resilience investments.

Discussion-Based Exercises

Discussion-based exercises are the simplest to organize and facilitate. These structured events can involve the full team or a subset of leadership with roles in the recovery solution. Participants explore relevant issues and walk through recovery plans in a low-pressure environment. The audience works best when they are broad base of attendees, where there is going to be diversity of thought and discussions generated. Because of this discussion-based exercises can work well within strategic planning sessions, future risk alignment sessions, or team days, wherever future thinking, objective setting and challenging conversations occur.

Aligned to Objectives:

- Building awareness of Business Continuity, its use, and the impact of defined recovery strategies.

- Validating that the critical business process RTOs make sense across a broad range of participants.

- Ensuring the selection of critical business processes across various plans is appropriate.

Expected Outcome or Improvement Opportunities:

- Enhanced appreciation of the organization's resilience capability and capacity.

- Increased leadership buy-in for future exercises and BC planning.

- Improved cross-team understanding of individual roles in a crisis or incident.

2. Scenario Exercises

Scenario exercises, are commonly used discussion-based activities, reflect specific recovery strategies against extreme but plausible events. Typically presented in a tabletop environment- where the actions are discussed but not actually put into practice. The scenario exercise may extend past the initial emergency management scenarios to cover a longer timeline of a BC events. The audience can include - Executive leadership teams, crisis communications teams, key stakeholders involved in strategic decision-making.

Aligned to Objectives:

- Assessing strategic decision-making capacity and capability.

- Evaluating the ability to adapt strategic strategies to the scenario.

- Testing crisis communication effectiveness, including identifying what should be communicated, to whom, and by when.

- Ensuring the right stakeholders are identified for the scenario.

Expected Outcome or Improvement Opportunities:

- Activation of crisis teams and decision-making capacity.

- Validation of the board's role in crisis response.

- Development of standardized communication templates and starting points.

3. Simulation Exercises

Simulation exercises are more elaborate, involving response teams, senior leadership, or crisis response teams across the organization, often from their usual locations. Participants respond to an unfolding scenario with tactical and strategic decision-making, mirroring a real incident. Simulation exercises can work well across multiple layers of response with and audience at the strategic level, the Crisis Management Team- senior leadership- thinking and acting on the strategic elements of the exercise while the operational cross-functional teams responsible for implementing recovery strategies are responding to the scenario at the more practical level.

Aligned to Objectives:

- Validating the Estimated Recovery Time (ERT) and the time it takes to activate recovery strategies.

- Assessing the crisis response mechanism's ability to recognize and respond to events at short notice.

- Evaluating the initial actions of response teams and their decision-making capabilities.

Expected Outcome or Improvement Opportunities:

- Identifying the need for more or better training.

- Understanding the value placed on response vs. BAU (Business as Usual) work.

- Discovering gaps or conflicts across multiple recovery strategies.

4. Live Exercises

Live exercises can range from small-scale rehearsals of specific responses, such as evacuations, to full-scale rehearsals involving multiple parties like the Airport Company, FENZ, Police, and Regulators. They are the most realistic way of training individuals and exercising plans but require extensive planning and resources. The audience of the exercise could be across the entire organization, including external partners, key emergency response teams or critical business process owners.

Aligned to Objectives:

- Validating the ERT and the actual time it takes to activate recovery strategies for critical business processes.

- Recreating critical business processes using mitigation strategies to identify learning opportunities.

- Measuring the time taken to recover critical business processes to validate recovery mitigation strategies can meet the required RTO.

Expected Outcome or Improvement Opportunities:

- Improved understanding of real-time response effectiveness.

- Identification of practical improvements in recovery strategies and processes.

- Enhanced coordination with external parties during large-scale incidents.

5. Tests

A test is a unique type of exercise with a pass/fail element, typically applied to equipment, recovery procedures, or technology rather than individuals. Test work best when the audience is Subject Matter Experts (SME's) with technical understanding of the processes being tested.

Aligned to Objectives:

- Proving the completeness of Disaster Recovery plans to rebuild servers or data centers within the recovery period.

- Validating a standing BC recovery strategy, such as concurrent work at two contact centers.

- Testing failover of direct phone lines or auto-forward rules on emails.

- Achieving non-subjective objectives where evidence of a Yes/No outcome can be provided.

Expected Outcome or Improvement Opportunities:

- Ensuring technical recovery solutions are effective and reliable.

- Identifying and rectifying gaps in recovery procedures.

- Providing tangible evidence of recovery capabilities to stakeholders.

Incorporating a variety of exercise types into your Business Continuity Management System (BCMS) ensures comprehensive preparedness and continuous improvement. You are going to learn something different from each type of exercise, offering unique benefits and opportunities to enhance your organization's resilience and response capabilities.