Constructive Simulation for the Oil and Gas Industry

Several people have asked about the application of constructive simulation for the Oil and Gas Industry.  As we have seen, safety and loss prevention are huge items that are at the top of everyone’s mind today, mainly due to the problems with BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  As previous blogs have discussed, constructive simulation has broad applicability to nearly any public safety scenarios – how can simulation be used as a tool for the Oil and Gas Industry?

Constructive Simulation is new to the Oil and Gas Industry.  Simulation and simulators of different types have been used for many years for a variety of uses, from production to reservoir visualization.  Constructive simulation is a different tool that has huge potential to change a number of facets of the energy industry, much the same as GIS technology has revolutionized how we record and present data.  Constructive Simulation brings a real-time, dynamic and visual tool into our tool bag that greatly improves the way we approach emergencies, safety and training.

Because we are talking about a new application of constructive simulation, let's review some of the basics.

What is Constructive Simulation?  Constructive simulation is a computer-based tool that allows one or more users to control a large number of “entities” within the simulation.  An entity can be a person, a vehicle or even a piece of equipment.  All of the entities interact within the simulation according to rules that are part of the simulation, itself.  Sounds complex?  Not really – once a scenario has been designed and built, much of this interaction is automatic and it occurs behind the scenes.  The people controlling the entities typically have simple on-screen menus to control their movement and interaction. 

I believe that Constructive Simulation could very successfully be applied in the following situations:

• Digital Safety Training Briefings
• Emergency Response Plan Preparation 
• Emergency Response Plan Validation
• Integration with Existing GIS Products
• Incident Command Training
• Replacement or augmentation of tabletop exercises

I will discuss each of these applications in turn, but for today, I will cover just the first one.

Digital Safety Training Briefings

The aim of a safety briefing is for people to understand their role during an emergency so that they will know what to do and instinctively do it.  If people have to understand what to do during a dynamic situation, why use static tools like a Word document or PowerPoint?  Let’s face it – people often have a hard time reading a static document and then applying what they learned in real-life.  Why not use a dynamic, visual tool that will show people in real-time what they are supposed to do? 

The airplane safety videos do a good job of showing a dynamic safety briefing – Constructive Simulation can do the same thing for the energy industry, except on a much larger scale and with a greater degree of complexity.   Imagine being able to conduct a safety briefing using a dynamic tool that allowed you to walk a group of trainees through a complex event with a simple-to-understand and visual tool.  Imagine being able to show the trainees what they needed to do – from any perspective, fully controllable in real-time.  All of this is possible with a good constructive simulation. Imagine being able to re-run the scenario quickly and easily, showing different possibilities and contingencies.

Why not extend the capabilities of the safety briefing?  You could create your own constructive simulation-based safety videos that can be placed on your web site that would be playable by anyone.  Workers could use these briefing videos to improve their safety knowledge before being assigned to a new area and the energy company could monitor access to ensure that employees watched the video as part of their safety indoctrination.

If you use your imagination you can quickly see that Constructive Simulation has the potential to greatly improve safety briefings - even to the point of holding a small simulation exercise at the end of the briefing to ensure that the employees (managing their own "entities") can confidently and successfully do what they are supposed to do in an emergency.  Imagine being able to play the safety briefing/exercise with any type of emergency and switch to new emergencies in a couple of minutes to give the trainees a realistic training indoctrination in multiple environments.  Imagine the knowledge that the employees could have by DOING instead of just reading or listening.

In the next blog I will tackle the subject of emergency response plans.

Keep training!

Bruce

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

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

Image via Wikipedia

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  

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