Incident Response

Fire Drills

By now, the plans for your team should be taking shape, as you have considered planning, staffing, documenting, and marketing your team’s services, policies, processes, and procedures. At some point (hopefully before a real emergency occurs) it will be beneficial to conduct some fire drills to test your team’s capabilities. Going back to the fire department analogy, the fire chief doesn’t send all his resources, trucks and staff, out the door for each alarm; rather, a specific group of resources is deployed depending on the type of emergency.

One thing to bear in mind is that drill is never a substitute for the real thing; it’s easy to train and drill, but until the team is actually battle-tested, you’ll never really know how it responds under real pressure. The two primary goals of training are to foster effective operational teamwork, and to transform written processes and procedures into instinctive actions for the team so that during a real crisis, effort is focused on the problem at hand, not on applying the basics.

Nonetheless, a good training program is important for the team as well as for the nonteam players we discuss earlier in this chapter. The most common types of fire drills are role-playing and live drills. In role-playing drills, the team -- along with any other drill participants -- sits in a room and acts out a realistic scenario and its associated response. In a live drill, however, the team’s procedures are tested, with few of the participants aware ...