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Exercises & Tests in BCM🔗

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This area is not visible as a separate tile on the BCM overview page. Access is via the navigation menu.

With Exercises & Tests you verify whether your strategies and plans actually work in a real incident.
Standards and good practice require that BCM measures are not only documented on paper but are regularly tested.

Objectives of Exercises and Tests🔗

  • Demonstrate the effectiveness of strategies and plans,
  • Train staff and roles (e.g. crisis team, departments),
  • Identify weaknesses in procedures, technology, and communication,
  • Derive improvement measures.

Exercise Types🔗

Typical exercise types you can represent in the view:

  • Document Review (review of plans only),
  • Tabletop Exercise (scenario-based simulation at the table),
  • Technical Test (e.g. system recovery),
  • End-to-End Exercise (process chain, including department),
  • Full-Scale Exercise (potentially with actual disruption of individual components).

When creating an exercise, you can select the type so you can later evaluate by exercise category.

Planning an Exercise or Test🔗

  1. Open the Exercises & Tests view.
  2. Click "Create Exercise/Test".
  3. Enter:
  4. Title of the exercise,
  5. Type (e.g. Tabletop, Technical Test),
  6. Objective(s) (e.g. verify RTO for Process X, validate communication plan),
  7. Scope / affected processes,
  8. Affected strategies & plans if applicable,
  9. Date/time and duration,
  10. Participating roles/persons.

You can also attach documents, for example:

  • Exercise scenario,
  • Agenda,
  • Checklists.

Documenting the Execution🔗

After the exercise you document the course of events:

  • Brief execution report,
  • What worked well,
  • Where problems or delays occurred,
  • Whether defined objectives (e.g. RTO) were met,
  • Screenshots, logs, or other evidence if applicable.

The view typically provides fields such as:

  • "Results / Observations",
  • "RTO compliance" (yes/no),
  • "Lessons Learned Summary".

Deriving Findings and Measures🔗

Exercises and tests often yield new insights and areas for improvement.
For this purpose you can:

  1. Create findings for the exercise (e.g. "Communication with service provider was unclear").
  2. Define one or more measures per finding:
  3. Responsible person,
  4. Due date,
  5. Description of the measure.

These measures — like all others — flow into the central Findings & Measures area, where they can be managed across domains.

Evaluation and History🔗

The Exercises & Tests view also provides:

  • An overview of all exercises conducted per scope, process, or strategy,
  • An overview of when each plan was last tested,
  • Filters by:
  • Exercise type,
  • Date,
  • Status (planned/executed/evaluated),
  • Involved processes or strategies.

This allows you to generate lists such as:

  • "All critical processes with exercises in the last 12 months",
  • "All strategies that have never been tested".

Connection to Target/Actual Comparison, Strategies, and Audits🔗

  • In the Target/Actual Comparison you can see
    which critical processes do not yet have tested plans.

  • In Strategies & Solutions you can see for each strategy
    whether and when it was last exercised or tested.

  • In Audit Management, exercises and tests can be used as evidence of BCM effectiveness and linked to audit points.

This way, Exercises & Tests close the loop between concept, implementation, and practical validation of your BCM.