How to Plan a Public Safety Exercise in 5 Easy Steps – Part 1/2

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One of the biggest failures in the actual execution of training for public safety managers (or for anyone, for that matter) can be traced back to the lack of a plan.  Everyone’s time is valuable, so why waste it?  A little bit of planning can alleviate most of the issues and produce a positive training event and an experience that will gain you esteem and compliments from your peers.  Fortunately this is no secret and the steps are easy:

Step 1 – Establish Training Goals

What are you trying to teach?  Often people hold exercises for the simple reason that “it was scheduled” and then improvise the exercise design and content.  Mistake!  If you haven’t checked, first why not see if your organization has some training goals.  If you are fortunate, there will be clear training goals set out, complete with measureable objectives.  For instance, you may be working up toward next year’s TOPOFF exercise and your organization (or your superior organization) may have a plan to that end.  Work with it!  If there is no plan, then it is up to you.  Why not do a little research and find out what your organization is bad at doing and design an exercise to improve that.  Even if your organization works great together, why not stretch things and make the goal to work better with other organizations.  This leads in to the next point – establishing your training audience.

Step 2 – Determine the Training Audience

Who needs the training?  Everyone should undergo training, but you need to focus your training to a particular audience to provide the best benefit.  What I often do is divide the group of people to be trained into two groups – the Primary Training Audience, which is the small group that we are designing the training SPECIFICALLY for, and the Secondary Training Audience, who is everyone else who is attending the training event, but who are not the specific focus of the training.  What this does is add laser-sharp focus to your goals and objectives.  It either improves training for the Primary Training Audience, in which case it is necessary, or it improves training for the Secondary Training Audience, in which case it is non-essential and would ONLY be included if it DOES NOT impact the training or resources going toward the Primary Training Audience.  This seems harsh, but trust me, it is the ONLY way to separate the wheat from the chaff.  The good ideas (the ones that support the Primary Training Audience) get included and the well-intentioned, last minute, good but not great ideas don’t end up impacting the event.  If you are Draconian in disallowing stuff that detracts from or does not add to the Primary Training Audience’s training, then you WILL have a good training event. 

Step 3 – Hold an Initial Planning Meeting (at least two months before the event!)

The best training is a group effort with well-motivated and involved people who believe in what they are doing.  You need to invite the right group to the Initial Planning Meeting, and this means doing some research.  Who can you rely upon to complete tasks?  You need some “do-ers”.   Who needs “buy-in”?  In many cases you are going to have to forge together a number of working groups of people who, in the worst case, don’t want to work with you and are too busy.  The best case is that they want to help you and have some time to help you.  Plan for the worst, and hope for the best and you will do well. 

In preparation for the meeting, you should publish an agenda ahead of time to the agencies or groups who will be attending, monitoring and assisting with the exercise.  You need buy-in from everyone, so you might as well state it up front.  You also need to be clear that it is going to be a working meeting, so people who come should be prepared to make decisions on behalf of their department or group and that they will be participating in the planning.  You should publish with your agenda a tentative date or a few dates for the exercise event, as well as the planned participants - the groups, agencies, departments – as well as the overall training goals and objectives.  Solicit feedback prior to the event and try to iron any issues with the basic plan out prior to the planning conference – or else you will waste the whole session deciding what that training objective is or whether or not you are having an exercise at all.  

You should try to get the following out of the Initial Planning Meeting:

• Exercise Concept and Training Objectives - How long is the exercise?  Where will it be held?  Do the dates work? Break down the training objectives to at least one more level of detail.  You need to know more detail about your goals in order to design the exercise properly.  This is so important that for large exercises this portion is often conducted as its own meeting.
• Initial Groups of Master Scenario List Injects – what types of informational problems are going to be provided?  These should link directly to training objectives.
• Basic Scenario Overview – What is the constructive (time and space) side of the exercise going to look like?  What is the emergency (or emergencies) that the participants need to interact with in order to accomplish the training objectives
•  Outcomes – what is the training going to achieve?  After the training is over can we draw a line directly between the outcomes and the training objectives?
•  Goals for the Exercise – Perhaps there are one or more goals that the exercise is trying to achieve (over and above the training objectives).  “Establish a working relationship with Department X” or “Involve Agency Y” in training are examples of this.

After you have hammered all of these items out and have some good agreement amongst the participants, you will now see that what lies in front of you is a bunch of work. You probably need or organize the work either as formal committees (with a formal schedule of meetings) or as informal working groups (with a formal schedule of meetings and milestones). The point is that unless it is a very simple exercise or you are a tireless worker with nothing else to do, there is probably more work here than one person can accomplish.  Here are some examples of the working groups needed:

·         Administrative Working Group – working out the details of the venue, feeding, travel, accommodations, administrative instruction, contracting, work parties for setup and teardown (if required), bookings, etc.

·         Scenario Writing Board – the group of people who are going to create the exercise.  What types of subject matter experts are needed?  Where will they come from?  Who will create the Master Scenario List injects?  How will the constructive side of the exercise come together?  Where is the scenario?  How do we find out about which assets will be involved?  All of these details (and more) need to be discussed.

·         Exercise Control Working Group – The exercise control working group is in charge of the overall exercise.  How it all works out in the end is dependent on this group and how they create the overall exercise – Their aim is to ensure the exercise meets the training objectives.  This group is usually small and members sit in on the other working groups.  This group will also be instrumental in choosing the tools to be used and the contractor(s) to be hired for the exercise.

·         Personnel Group – someone needs to coordinate the invitations for other departments and agencies, managing the big wigs who will be attending and their interaction with the exercise, the invitations to the subject matter experts, finding suitable observer/mentors to work with the training audience, and so on.

These groups should set objectives, schedule and milestones and meet as frequently as required to ensure the work is being done.  Often the meeting can be a simple teleconference where the products are shared beforehand and the meeting focuses on any issues with the products and what needs to be done next. 

In the next blog in this series I will focus on the two remaining steps – the Mid Term/Master Scenario Events List Meeting and the Final Planning Meeting.

Keep Training!

Bruce