Controlling the Process of Contingency Planning

By Michael W. Frishberg

Organizations spend thousands on contingency plan documentation, yet plan activation is infrequent. How is quality assured? What works best to train those needed for plan fulfillment (emergency or business response teams, etc)? Can training and plan maintenance be accomplished more effectively?

Management Exercises Control the Planning Process
An exercise development process gets the most out of each exercise. The steps below define a process that controls exercise development and outcome management for any and all contingency plans, (safety, Y2K, security, business continuity, disaster, environmental, etc.).

Exercise Planning Cycle

1. Plan
Contingency plans are activated to maintain or re-establish operations safely, using a minimum of resources. Exercises create plans and make training more effective. Exercises are the best means to prove plans perform as expected, before they are needed.

2. Exercise Development Team
Exercising requires knowledge of command and control systems, facilities, the plan, participants, potential hazards and more. Design teams include people from departments who will exercise, and/or others experienced in exercise development. Team members staff the exercise.

3. Establish Exercise Framework
Exercises snapshot the capabilities of an organization to gracefully overcome difficulty. A larger framework reflects standards of practice, regulatory compliance, quality measurements, etc. Positioning exercises within the framework helps to maximize results.

4. Scope the Exercise
"Who, where, how long, what equipment," are some questions that define exercise scope. Exercises range in complexity and cost from seminars to full-scale exercises that more fully simulate reality.

5. Establish Exercise Objectives
Measurement is crucial for proper plan improvement. Make exercise objectives "S.M.A.R.T." -- Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-oriented to ensure success. Proper objectives make exercises less expensive and more effective.

6. Refine Exercise Targets: Evaluations
Evaluators perform this task, or participants measure themselves. Well-designed evaluations reflect the exercise objectives and aid reporting.

7. Establish Exercise Scenarios
Can the plan overcome the problem? Scenarios establish realism to elicit responses from participants, measurable against the plan.

8. Develop Exercise Structure
Controllers, simulators, evaluators, participants, observers and others may attend. Keep participants busy. Safety is paramount. A script controls activities.

9. Conduct the Exercise
Exercises measure a portion of plan operation. If participants like the experience, they will eagerly participate again.

10. Post Exercise Debriefings
What happened, according to whom? Exercises are experiments with human subjects; respect for stress level is important.

11. Collect and Analyze Evaluations
Proper evaluation questions are easier to combine into a meaningful report and allow for proper judgment of objectives.

12. Issue Exercise Reports and Improve the Plan
Exercise reports reflect how the exercise met the objectives, point out corrective actions and suggest plan changes. Exercises justify last year’s expenditures and suggest next year’s contingency plan budget.

13. Automate Exercise Development
Building the relationships between exercise components requires a data base application. An exercise development application should affect the entire development, conduct and after-action process, and provide quality control for the contingency planning process.

About the Author
Michael Frishberg is President of Cliffside Software, Inc., developer of software to improve the quality of contingency planning and training. For more information on this topic, call toll free, (888) 752-6489, or visit www.cliffsidesoftware.com.