The Role of Competing Objectives in Exercise Design and Evaluation

The Role of Competing Objectives in Exercise Design and Evaluation

As an exercise practitioner with experience in different types and levels of exercises, I question the efficacy of our existing exercise evaluation paradigms (e.g., HSEEP, REPP, CSEPP, etc.). In my experience, they are messy and misaligned with the overarching objectives we are trying to achieve. 

This messiness is partly due to the fact that we create dueling objectives such as training and evaluation. For example, if you slow down or modify an exercise to ensure responders understand and can perform their duties (training objective), can you objectively state the system capability they performed was successfully tested (performance objective)? I have a hard time saying this unless the capability's performance...

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Evaluating Preparedness at Different Levels of Analysis

Evaluating Preparedness at Different Levels of Analysis

I recently conducted an academic/practice-based research project that provided a better understanding of preparedness evaluation. One interesting thing to come out of this research was a capabilities-based exercise framework for a Federal regulatory agency. I will be posting an overview of this research once it is officially published. 

Another interesting aspect of the research confirmed how preparedness evaluation is still a complicated and difficult process that doesn't always yield the best results. We still have many...

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UPCOMING: National Information Sharing Exercise

UPCOMING: National Information Sharing Exercise

Information sharing exercises are rare and hard to put on, but are important to learning about how to improve information sharing in disasters. 

I am passing on this information about an upcoming information sharing exercise. Participation is open to many different organizations in the EM community and I encourage your to sign up and participate as soon as possible. The exercise will take place on May 11, 2016.

Below are the details that were provided to me:

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Exercising Social Media - Review of and Q&A with EMSocialSimulation

Exercising Social Media - Review of and Q&A with EMSocialSimulation

I was recently able to talk with both Corey Mulryan and Kyle McPhee from Hagerty Consulting, a well-known and fast growing emergency management consulting firm. Corey and Kyle have been leading an effort at Hagerty to develop a new social media exercise tool called EMSocialSimulation. This blog post contains a review of the tool as well as Hagerty's Q&A responses that provide additional information.  

EMSocialSimulation is a great social media simulation tool geared toward organizations and jurisdictions looking to train and exercise on beginner to intermediate social media capabilities at an affordable price. I was impressed...

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LaunchPAD - A New Exercise Delivery Tool + Q&A with the Founder

LaunchPAD - A New Exercise Delivery Tool + Q&A with the Founder

I was recently able to sit down with Robert Burton, Founder and Managing Director of Preparedex, LLC.  The company recently launched a virtual exercise delivery platform called LaunchPAD.  There are very limited technology options to support preparedness exercises, so I was very excited to learn more about LaunchPAD, especially given my background putting together large-scale exercises for almost four years.  

LaunchPAD hones in on a very important issue, geographically...

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