Conventional wisdom says, “there is no such thing as a failed exercise”. Unfortunately, we believe that most exercises are in fact a waste of time and effort. In short…failures!
Regularly exercising your DR/BC capability is arguably as important as its original development…maybe more so! Tabletop exercises are an invaluable way to train your teams on the recovery timeline and their responsibilities at time of disaster. They are also the best way to orient your teams on the structure and flow of your recovery plans, the complexities of impact assessment, the uncertainties of plan activation, the distinctions between their responsibilities and those of the operational business units, and their ongoing maintenance responsibilities. Tabletop exercises are also the best way to explore the nuances of different events, to prepare your teams to understand how varying impact scenarios change their recovery duties and capabilities, and to explore how different decisions impact a recovery.
Unfortunately, tabletop exercises have been suffering the same challenges for decades. They require extensive scripting to a specific scenario and require the participants follow the same path through the plan that the instructor is prepared to illustrate. Too often, the moderator drones over a PowerPoint slideshow and requires a cast of “actors” that significantly increases complexity of preparation and execution…and significantly increases the cost of the exercise. And unfortunately, pre-scripted exercises, by definition, follow a predefined, linear path that does not accommodate session variables or allow participants flexibility in their responses.
Instead, consider WTG’s revolutionary NextGen TableTop Console that eliminates all of the historical challenges associated with developing and executing tabletop exercises. One person can literally deliver over 1,000,000 unique exercises in real-time without any advanced preparation. An endless number of different scenarios can be explored quickly, easily and cost-effectively. In a matter of hours, your team’s practical experience can be increased dramatically and the breadth of their experience can be extended over a large number of possible disaster variants.
…automatically generate over 1,000,000 fully scripted, unique exercises.
