(Editor’s note: This is the first of a four-part series, written by Strohl experts, that will discuss best practices for conducting different types of business continuity planning tests and exercises. Future articles will discuss functional exercises, tabletop exercises and full-scale exercises.)

With any type of learning, objectives must be set to make it meaningful. This is true of business continuity planning and exercises. There are several types of exercises planners may choose to test their plan. Once such type is a structured walkthrough.

The Disaster Recovery Institute International (DRII) defines a structured walkthrough as: One method of testing a specific component of a plan. Typically, a team member makes a detailed presentation of the component to other team members (and possibly non-members) for their critique and evaluation.

Beyond that, it’s an exercise used to review a specific part of a plan in order to obtain feedback from team members. In addition, it can be used to obtain agreement on strategies, to identify gaps, to verify assumptions and to gather additional information.

It’s important to verify details of a business continuity plan to ensure that various parts of the plan will work. This is particularly crucial with rather complex plans to ensure a recovery strategy can be carried out successfully at the time of disaster. Structured walkthrough exercises are “mini drills” that can be conducted to ensure parts of a plan work.

The Value of the Exercise
In planning a structured walkthrough exercise, it is important to have specific objectives identified. Objectives should identify specific outcomes, be consistent with the goals of the overall plan and be measurable. With objectives in place, an exercise becomes more meaningful and valuable. Results can be used to improve strategies, training, procedures and many other facets of recovery.

A structured walkthrough exercise promotes collaboration and coordination. Working together and synchronizing tasks within and between teams are factors that tie the finer details together to enable successful, faster and/or more effective recovery of a business unit or enterprise. Good ideas can generate other ideas, making meetings like these worthwhile. A structured walkthrough provides the circumstances to identify interdependencies between teams and business units.

Structured walkthrough exercises can also identify training needs. While conducting the exercise, it may become apparent that some team members would be comfortable carrying out designated responsibilities but may require additional assistance or need alternates. Cross training becomes necessary. With more complex recovery plans, beginning training with plan components makes training and learning more manageable and less overwhelming.

Locations
Structured walkthroughs should be conducted at a single facility with the team being tested. If dependent teams are involved and they are in the vicinity, they can attend the walkthrough at the facility where it is held. However, many organizations have offices geographically dispersed and other methods may be practical, such as conducting the exercise via webinar or videoconference, to enable team members, alternates, and dependent teams to participate.

Participants
A structured walkthrough exercise is an opportunity to learn if additional clarifying details are needed in a plan. Experts who may have provided information for plan development but had not seen how the information had come together will have the opportunity to view the whole plan. The structured walkthrough demonstrates how the information has been organized and assembled.

As plan details are communicated, the team can consider potential issues that need to be considered and the situation allows for groupthink decision-making on how potential problems could be mitigated. Interdependent teams could also participate to verify any assumptions made about the actions. What-ifs can be introduced into the discussion to evaluate the team’s abilities to respond to various scenarios. Scenarios could range from simple to complex.

Scoring
If it’s decided that an exercise will be measured or scored, scoring criteria can be developed in several ways but should be established beforehand. Scoring should be meaningful, practical and quantitative. Everyone involved in the exercise must agree to the scoring method that will be used and understand it.

The structured walkthrough exercise is an opportune time to discuss how well the plan component will be able to score and look at potential barriers or bottlenecks that could result in a low-scoring exercise.

Scheduling
Structured walkthrough exercises are good checkpoints during plan development or in preparation for a larger, more complex exercise. These exercises should be conducted with enough time to follow-up with identified updates or revisions to meet plan development deadlines. Participation of key individuals may be more critical in structured walkthrough exercises, especially if they are used for evaluation purposes to ensure that an important plan component will work.

Exercise Follow-Ups
After an exercise, it’s important to summarize the outcome and identify any necessary follow-up actions. Often times, much discussion will have taken place making it easy to lose sight of main goals and objectives. A few good practices and thoughts include:

• Briefly review the objectives for the exercise and determine if they have been met.
• Highlight the lessons learned, issues identified and any solutions discovered.
• What unexpected events turned up and how were they handled?
• What were the impacts and what could be done to address situations like these?
• Document responsibility and completion dates for follow-up action items.
• Briefly document the results of the exercise including objectives, outcomes and follow-ups.
• Other details that may prove valuable include: duration, date, location, type of exercise, participants, method used for conducting the exercise, e.g., in-person meeting, webinar, etc.
• Distribute the results to appropriate personnel.

Regular reviews of specific plan components are valuable, not only for recovery from disasters, but for everyday improvement or troubleshooting, keeping a plan updated, having it ready for auditing and training. The more exercises that are conducted, the more personnel learn and the better you will be able to recover. To quote General Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Plans are useless, planning is essential.”