Testing & Exercises

You should conduct testing and exercises to evaluate the effectiveness of your preparedness program, make sure employees know what to do, and find any missing parts. There are many benefits to testing and exercises:

Train personnel; clarify roles and responsibilities
Reinforce knowledge of procedures, facilities, systems, and equipment
Improve individual performance as well as organizational coordination and communications
Evaluate policies, plans, procedures, and the knowledge and skills of team members
Reveal weaknesses and resource gaps
Comply with local laws, codes, and regulations
Gain recognition for the emergency management and business continuity program

Testing the Plan

When you hear the word “testing,” you probably think about a pass/fail evaluation. You may find that there are parts of your preparedness program that will not work in practice. Consider a recovery strategy that requires relocating to another facility and configuring equipment at that facility. Can equipment at the alternate facility be configured in time to meet the planned recovery time objective? Can alarm systems be heard and understood throughout the building to warn all employees to take protective action? Can members of emergency response or business continuity teams be alerted to respond in the middle of the night? Testing is necessary to determine whether or not the various parts of the preparedness program will work.

Exercises

When you think about exercises, physical fitness to improve strength, flexibility, and overall health comes to mind. Exercising the preparedness program helps to improve the overall strength of the preparedness program and the ability of team members to perform their roles and to carry out their responsibilities. There are several different types of exercises that can help you to evaluate your program and its capability to protect your employees, facilities, business operations, and the environment

Program Improvement

There are opportunities for program improvement following an actual incident. A critique should be conducted to assess the response to the incident. Lessons learned from incidents that occur within the community, within the business’ industry or nationally can identify needs for preparedness program changes. Best practices and instructional guidance published by trade associations, professional societies, newsletters, and government website can be resources to evaluate and improve your preparedness program.

Gaps and deficiencies identified during reviews should be recorded and addressed through a corrective action program. Reviews, evaluations, and improvements should be documented and maintained on file.

For more information on reducing risk or any of our other services, please contact Jeff Harrison at jeff.harrison@cbservices.org or 800.807.0300 ext 2543.

Reference: http://www.ready.gov/business