Business Continuity Exercises

At Lootok, we believe exercises are so important to resiliency that we recommend starting with them. While most business continuity consultancies firmly begin with a business impact analysis, follow with a business continuity plan, and then carry out an exercise, we've found that exercises are effective at any and every point in the journey. Why? Because exercises are always a great way to:

1. Engage people to think in "crisis mode", which helps set the stage for the BIA, plan development, or another task;
2. Identify the most outstanding and urgent gaps and vulnerabilities
3. Get people together to start thinking on the same page and make group decisions
4. Gain results to share with senior leadership to promote the need for business continuity management

Lootok offers the following five exercises to engage your team. All exercise scenarios are presented using realistic, multimedia effects customized to your company and the incident to create an experience that is exciting as well as effective. Other exercises designed more specifically to the needs of your company may be developed upon request.

Crisis Management Exercise

A crisis management exercise gets senior leadership involved in the process by active, practical means. Lootok's crisis management exercises are developed with insight from you that allows us to poke holes at the weak spots in the organization's resiliency. We perform research on the company, the building, historical risks to the area, and challenges facing the industry, to create a scenario that constantly shifts, throwing new and believable challenges toward the management team — just like a real crisis.

Rapid-Fire Scenario Planning

Using a variety of multimedia tools, we challenge your team to respond quickly to scenarios that cover everything from reputational damage, criminal and violent threats, pandemics, physical threats, labor shortages, accidents, and compounding incidents. As your team must think on its toes, its members are challenged to come to quick agreements about how various incidents should be handled. This is a great way to get people thinking "outside the box" about the types of situations that may require invocation of business recovery, and set the stage for a business continuity initiative.

Business Recovery Exercise

Put your plan to the test with a thorough business recovery exercise. This exercise is only performed after business continuity plans have been completed. We focus on validating strategies for recovery, integrating departmental plans where interdependencies exist, ensuring resource allocation, and aligning the critical recovery path with the contents of each plan and the priorities of senior leadership.

Augmented Reality Exercise

Through our partnerships with the masterminds at creative agencies, Mammalfish and Whistlebox, we bring exercises to a whole new level. Using smartphones with their augmented reality application, exercise participants can actually "see" an incident unfold before their eyes. By pre-tagging particular objects around your office, participants experience events through the smartphone camera — for instance, a particular door can be tagged to have smoke coming from underneath it, or a particular stairway can be tagged to be blocked with obstacles or flooding with water. This is a cutting edge way to make your scenario as "real" as possible — without actually burning the building down.

"The Whole Shebang"

Want to really see how your company will respond to an incident? We conduct exercises that integrate fields such as business recovery, incident management, emergency response, internal and external communications, security, coordination with business partners, coordination with emergency services and neighbors, and anything else relevant to your company and its location. We work with you to choose a scenario that stresses all of the elements you want to test in a realistic way, and utilize experts in each field to evaluate the results.