Emergency & Continuity Management as Part of Daily Operations: Automating Testing

So you’re plugging away at work when you hear the dreaded sound… The building fire alarm has been triggered - yep, another drill. You go through the exercise, as required. Everyone’s rolling their eyes and thinking, “Another silly fire drill, I have important work to do.” We all have thought it at least once, even those who’ve arranged the drill. Yet, if a fire was to breakout, we'd know where to go and what to do. It may be "silly", but these exercises work.

The above is a daily occurrence all over the world at businesses, schools, hotels and apartment complexes. It is not only required, but also a necessity in assuring safety of employees, contractors, visitors and customers. Therefore, these exercises are conducted to create an awareness reaction to such events. This, in turn, makes the case for making exercising the recovery of critical operations a daily operative task.

So how is this done? Should a business begin requiring 2 – 4 hour exercises daily? Not at all. In fact, an exercise can be far less intrusive than a fire drill AND take less than half the time in most cases. Here’s how:

Canned messages – For companies with integrated ENS (Emergency Notification Systems), this task is easier, but it can be done with a basic email system (Exchange, Gmail, etc). Simply create a series of messages that require a desired response. In most cases, a voting button can be used, but some clients of ours include a series of answers for the participant to choose from in order to get to the desired result. The answer is typed into the reply message and sent back to the test administrator. In the case of an ENS or a collaboration site (SharePoint) the admin can pull the results in a report generated by the program.

Surveys – Similar to the canned messages, but usually more detailed in administering. The admin will usually include scenarios and include a series of answers for the participant to choose from, again, to come to the desired result(s). SharePoint (or the like) are usually the preferred system, but email and an ENS can be used.

The above two methods are merely suggestions and can be expanded on, but the main point is this… Exercises CAN be conducted daily/weekly making emergency/continuity/risk management a part of daily operations WITHOUT being intrusive and time consuming.

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