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

In the last blog, I covered the first three steps of planning a Public Safety Exercise:

1. Establish Training Goals
2. Determine the Training Audience
3. Hold an Initial Planning Meeting (at least two months before the event)!

Now it is time to finish off this article with the remaining two steps:

    4. Mid-Term/Master Scenario Events List Meeting

    5. Final Planning Meeting

Step Four – The Mid-Term/Master Scenario Events List Meeting

This meeting takes place around 45 days prior to the exercise and should involve representatives from all of the working groups that you set up two weeks earlier.   Just after your Initial Planning Meeting, you should have sent out meeting minutes and solicited milestones and a work plan from each of your working groups.

With this information under your arm, you should publish an agenda to the attendees.  

As a minimum, this is what you should try to accomplish during this meeting:

• Finalize the overall plan for the exercise
• Have a detailed exercise timeline completed
• Have  all of the Master Scenario Injects planned (but perhaps not fully completed)
• Finalize the exercise documentation, or at least have a concrete idea when the documentation will be done and by whom
• Agree on the physical exercise location and have a very clear idea of the internal layout (who will work where)
• Set a date, time and location for the Final Planning Meeting

Despite occurring only two weeks after the initial planning conference, the bulk of the planning and the vast majority of the exercise design should be done by the Mid Term Planning Meeting.  If your work groups are motivated and the work was planned out well, it should have gone quickly and according to plan.  If you had the forethought to set good milestones and check up early on the progress of the working groups, you would now have a very good idea about the exercise status and have a high degree of comfort. 

Often you will find out that things have not gone according to plan and some key work has been left undone.  This is the reason for holding the Mid-Term Planning Meeting so closely following the Initial Planning Meeting – you have only lost a couple of weeks and you have at least a month to go before the exercise.  You can re-assign the work and still recover without breaking a sweat.

Who should attend this meeting? Definitely the Exercise Control Working Group needs to attend, as well as key representatives from the Personnel Working Group and the Administration Working Group.  Depending on the state of the exercise design, you may have to a smaller or larger number from the Scenario Design working Group.   Remember that minor participants can connect with the meeting via WebEx/GoToMeeting or teleconference during key discussions.  There is no need to bring everyone together again.

Here are some key documents that need to be put together, or at least designed during the meeting:

• Exercise Background – the read-in for the exercise that describes the background situation, the resources available,
• Simulation Cell Plan – who will do what during the simulation?  Who are the role players and what are they doing?  What is the constructive simulation component to the exercise?  What are the master scenario events list groupings,  who is delivering them, and how are they being delivered? What is the communications plan for the simulation cell to communicate with the participants?
• Exercise Plan – Objectives for the exercise, plan for achieving the objectives, linking between the simulation cell plan and the objectives, the plan for Observer/Mentors – how will they observe and interact and how will they record what they see?  What is the security plan?  How will the exercise be laid out at the facility?   Where will key events take place?  What about name tags?  Feeding?  Coffee?  The exercise plan should manage all of these key details and more.

By the end of the meeting, you should have nearly all of the details coordinated finely enough and written down in enough detail that anyone could run the exercise in your place.  Remember that an exercise that requires Herculean effort to pull off at the last minute is not a success – it is simply a sign of poor planning.  The more sweat that goes into the upfront preparations, the fewer tears that occur during the actual event (and after).

Toward the end of the meeting, you should probably do a verbal walk-through of the event from start to finish so that everyone shares your vision as to how the exercise will take place.  The last thing you should do is make sure that the action items are covered and that everyone knows what they need to do, when they need to do it and what is next.

If all has gone well, you will have the following in hand:

1. A detailed Exercise Plan that completely describes how the event will take place, how it meets the training objectives, how the objectives are tracked and met and who does what
2. A complete and detailed timeline for the exercise and key events
3. The Master Scenario List Events entirely planned out (when/how/what/who) and a plan for completing the writing details
4. A detailed Simulation Cell Plan so that describes what information and events will be portrayed by the Simulation Cell and how they will be passed to the participants.
5. The Exercise Background Document in enough detail that it can be passed to participants

Within a day or so following the meeting, ensure you send out the minutes and finished products to everyone who needs it.  As a minimum, this is everyone who participated in the Initial Planning Meeting and anyone who you think should get it.  The only documents that should be “close hold” are the Master Scenario Events List and the Simulation Cell Plan, as these will spoil the surprise for the participants.  Everything else should be distributed as far and wide as possible to anyone who will read them.

STEP 5 – Final Planning Meeting

The Final Planning Meeting should take place about two weeks prior to the actual event.  It is a good idea to send out the agenda a week in advance so that you can collect any comments and make any desired modifications ahead of time.

By now, all of the heavy lifting has been done and ALL information has been completed and documents are done in for review.  The entire exercise is basically “done” and everything is coming together nicely.

Here is what you want to confirm during the meeting:

• All of the writing is done
• All of the logistics are prepared
• The participants are ready
• There are no issues
• Everything is ready to go to print

There should be no adjustments to the plan – just smoothing out wrinkles.  

Here are some specific tasks that you should ensure happen during the meeting:

1. Approve any documents that have not been approved.  People need to get on with using these documents right away, so you can’t hang on to them any longer.
2. Review the logistics in fine detail and ensure everything is in place.  What about name tags?  Do we have enough flip charts?  Pens and paper?  Do we need whiteboards?
3. Review and approve the simulation portion of the exercise.  Is the scenario fully designed?  Are all the resources that are needed programmed in?  Is the MSEL complete and ready to go?  Ensure that the simulation portion is fully developed and ready to go.
4. Go thought the exercise conduct step by step to ensure that everything is ready and in place and someone is in charge of it.  Take time to brainstorm and make sure nothing is forgotten – who will meet the bigwig at the door and show her around?  This is “now or never” for the event.
5. Final Check – the whole reason for holding this event is to achieve the training objectives.  Take a last look and make sure that you are, in fact, meeting the training objectives you have set out to meet.  Has your exercise grown too large and complex, or is it just the right size?  Is the focus properly on the Primary Training Audience and have all the distractions been eliminated?  Do you have a foolproof plan for capturing post exercise points with experienced observer/mentors?  How are they briefed?  How are they controlled?

With a final sigh of relief, you can push your chair away from the table, having planned an effective and well-focused exercise. 

Congratulations…And keep training!

Bruce

Constructive Simulation for Public Safety - How it Works

In my last blog I talked about what is wrong with training for Emergency Responders, EOCs and Public Safety officials.  The basic problems are too much scripting in the training (not enough flexibility), too costly to provide good training, and not enough feedback on decisions.  This is where a constructive simulation comes in.

What is a constructive simulation?  It is basically an "arena" where free play can take place, participants can make items in the simulation (entities) do things and respond to things, and people make decisions which are implemented within the simulation. Basically Constructive Simulation is a cause-effect tool that provides feedback to participants. Unlike 3D (virtual) simulations, constructive simulations typically show a map and a participant operating the computer can control many (10s, 100s, 1000s of entities) to accomplish their task.

Simulation is not a game. For instance, a game may or may not have realistic responses for player actions.  No simulation is perfect, but if the actions and reactions are "way off" then bad lessons result.  In other words, participants will take the bad lessons (that won't really work) and try to apply these in real life - disaster results. Obviously then, for a simulation to be effective it has to be somewhat realistic in order to teach good lessons.

The other difference between a game and a simulation is the post-exercise review. Games usually don't allow you to go back and review what went right and what went wrong. This is an essential point to learning, since you seldom have time to learn during the actual simulation. A good simulation will allow you and your team to review what happened, discuss a better way forward and to replay the simulation again in order to cement these lessons. There are many other differences, but sometimes, with the correct supervision and the right focus, a game can be used as a learning tool - these are what people sometimes call "Serious Games".

So how do you actually "run" a simulation?  There are many different ways. Some purists would say that the only way is from within a heavily controlled environment where every activity is planned and scripted, but I personally think that this removes some of the "fun " element to training (which is very important) and also limits potential training opportunities.

The opposite is wrong, too, where everyone gets together to train and no-one has any objectives and there is no aim to the training - this is game playing and is a waste of time. Probably a happy medium is best, where there are learning objectives and someone is in charge of ensuring the training is meeting the learning objectives. Constructive simulation doesn't always have to always be a group training tool - there is also room for using it as an individual training tool. The software has to be the right type in order to allow effective training, but this type of training scenario is ideal for training people up on how to use electronic Command and Control software such as eTeam, WebEOC and SoftRisk.  In these cases the simulation is appended to the C2 system to provide input "as if" it was coming from the field.

What about the physical layout?  Some simulations can be run on a single computer and others require a server, an Internet connection or a bank of computers. Often the simplest solution that meets your needs is the best. Typically a constructive simulation exercise has a few "cells" that are in charge of different things, and these are increased, decreased or eliminated depending on the size, scope and aim of the exercise:

• Exercise Control - ensures that the exercise is "on track" and meets the training objectives, timings and aims. They are in charge of the overall event.
• Participants (players) - these are the people undergoing training, and their setup, communications equipment, tools, techniques and procedures should be as close as possible to what they would use in real life.  
• Simulation Cell - this is the group that provides the simulation training to the participants or players.  This cell contains computers, role players and communications equipment to communicate directly with the participants. Often the simulation cell can be subdivided into additional cells for larger simulation, but this can be discussed in greater detail later on.
• Observers and Mentors - this group is typically composed of subject matter experts or similarly trained people and they shadow the participants and takes notes of what is going right or wrong for the Post Exercise Review.

The actual exercise has several components as well:

• Welcome brief - participants are given introductions to the facility and other participants, administrative instructions and timings for the exercise.
• Exercise Brief - participants are given an overview of the exercise aims and objectives (what the participants should get out of the exercise)
• Exercise Scenario Briefing - as required, participants are given an introduction to the scenario so that the exercise can start smoothly. The scenario may also be published to the participants ahead of time via email or regular mail.
• Exercise Start - The Exercise Control Cell globally announces the start of the exercise. Simultaneously (usually) the simulation software is started at this point.
• Exercise Conduct -The Simulation Cell personnel communicate with the participants as frequently as necessary and with the level of detail required to provide a realistic training environment. Much more on this in a later blog.
• End Exercise - The Exercise Control Cell globally announces the end of the exercise and the simulation software stops at this point. There is frequently a pause for up to an hour before the Post Exercise Review brief.
• Post Exercise Review - this brief is conducted interactively with the participants. Again, much more on this later on, as it is a vital component of simulation training.

As always, the various components are expanded, reduced or deleted depending on the aim of the exercise.   In a future blog, I will detail more about the exercise conduct and post exercise review portions.

Keep training!

Bruce