Scenario testing: a novel approach
All seriousness aside (as comedian Steve Allen used to say), a continuity exercise doesn’t have to be based on a boring (or even plausible) scenario to be effective. In fact, in the earliest stages of an exercise program, I have found that a fantasy scenario often works better than a scenario based on reality.
My favorite exercise scenario years ago was based on Tribbles. Tribbles are fictional animals in the Star Trek universe who first appeared in the episode titled “The Trouble With Tribbles” in 1967 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_With_Tribbles).
The scenario involved Tribbles infiltrating a critical data center and growing exponentially. The exercise participants were having so much fun – and actually doing a great job of dealing with contingencies – that they simply wouldn’t stop! A one-hour exercise ran over seven hours (and yes, they dealt with all of the Tribbles before it was over! Have you ever seen those truck-mounted vacuums used for cleaning out storm drains?). Other employees who had booked the conference room for later that day were practically threatened if they tried to disrupt the exercise!
In short, we were so effective in motivating the participants that they practically begged for more exercises – even going so far to set up their own weekly lunch sessions where they concocted and acted out their own scenarios. While they started out with fun scenarios, within a month they were coming up with increasingly complex and realistic workplace scenarios and far surpassing the scenarios our team would have presented. In short, when it came time for some serious, large-scale exercises, the participants not only were well trained and experienced, but they were able to conduct exercises at a much higher level than we had imagined.
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An unexercised contingency plan could be worse than no plan at all!
Be sure to read Disaster Recovery Testing: Exercising Your Contingency Plan, Philip Jan Rothstein, FBCI, Editor – the only book on this subject – for valuable tips, techniques and insights. Now only $49.00!
Tags: exercising, Testing
