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Testing Your Plan
Having a Contingency Plan is not enough. To ensure that your business is thoroughly prepared, you need to test your plan with realistic drills and exercises that are designed to enhance your BPP. The most common type of tests are drills, and functional and full-scale exercises.
The major purpose of a test is to learn something about how your plan actually works. A good test should challenge the plan but be a winnable situation. Far too many tests are designed as "no win" situations that work as a disincentive to employee participation in the BPP. The end product of any test is a set of lessons learned, plan and training updates, and most of all it should be a positive experience for the participants.
Drills
A drill is designed to test a single aspect of the plan. Examples include fire and evacuation drills, testing alarm systems and notification procedures, and tabletop drills that use a hypothetical situation to encourage discussion and build relationships. Drills are interactive and facilitators should correct missteps and steer discussions towards constructive consensus or conclusion.
Exercises
Designed to test multiple aspects of the plan during a simulated event. The aim of a functional exercise is to test a few pieces of the plan during a simulated incident with time pressure and a sense of urgency. A full-scale exercise is a comprehensive test of a complete response to a simulated event. It tests how multiple aspects of the plan and response interact during a near real situation with a clock ticking and very little external input. Exercise controllers keep the action moving while the evaluators compare performance to the exercise objectives.