Incident Exercise

Making mistakes is part of the learning process. So how do you get your team to learn how to identify and respond to incidents well without creating additional exposure to your organization in the face of a crisis? Interhack develops and delivers incident exercises to help your staff learn procedure and to operate as a team.

"After seeing the way that things tied together in the end, I now see how everything we did was organized to maximize the learning experience."

We offer four types of exercises, each built to address a different set of needs.

Orientation Workshops

        These are the least intensive exercises, designed to familiarize people with the concepts in play, the components of response, and the roles they play in the response.

Tabletop Exercises

        We bring together the players in a conference or classroom setting, and present the scenario. Each of the members of the team then assumes their role and we talk through the process of identification, triage, and response to the incident. These can help to identify gaps in procedure, where a missing step might prevent resolution on a matter. These are low intensity, and typically can be conducted over the course of several hours.

Functional Exercises

        When running personnel and procedures through a scenario, we often recommend being as realistic as possible. Here people conduct hands-on processes, working with simulated systems, and other elements that make the activity as close to reality as possible. When this is focused on a particular function or set of functions, we use the Functional Exercise. These typically run from six to twelve hours over the course of one to three days.

Full-Scale Exercise

        When responding to a scenario in a hands-on manner, involving an entire response team and all functions called for, we run a Full-Scale Exercise. This may last from twp days to a week, and is the most realistic experience needed to find weaknesses in operation, procedure, and technology. It also provides the greatest opportunity for team building and learning.

All exercises are built specifically with your industry, your organization, your policies, and your procedures in mind. Our exercises support multi-organizational and multi-agency response, including those managed under the Incident Command System (ICS) and National Incident Management System (NIMS).

Our instructors are the same people who conduct incident response operations and bring real-world experience to you. Contact us to discuss how an exercise can help you be better prepared for the next incident.