Director of training at PlanB Consulting Charlie Maclean-Bristol, FEPS, FBCI, recommends against spending too much time thinking about the specific scenario when planning business continuity exercises, and instead suggests focusing on objectives and format. He believes that overly complicated scenarios can mean that the training degenerates into pure entertainment, or only a demonstration of the designer’s wit, rather than become an opportunity for the individuals and organization to learn and improve their capacity to respond.
For objectives, Maclean-Bristol recommends picking one or a combination of objectives, focusing on:
- Exercising recovery processes,
- Exercising responders,
- Exercising plans, or
- Developing problem solving skills
In terms of formats, consideration needs to be given to the objectives, to determine whether it is best to perform a unified test for the entire organization, or instead to provide a series of smaller exercises, focusing on specific groups within the organization. Only once the objectives and formats are decided should the scenario be developed, so as to ensure the final proposed scenario actually achieves the goals of the training.
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