Steelhenge was selected by the UK’s Department of Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) to design and deliver a Tier 1 exercise. The objective of the exercise was to rehearse the integrated government response to a major telecoms disruption and its associated consequences. Steelhenge has a successful track record in delivering large scale multi-agency exercises for critical national infrastructure having completed similar projects for energy, food and fuel disruptions over the last five years.
The crisis management simulation exercise brought together all tiers of government (central, regional and local), the devolved administrations, the telecoms regulator, the telecommunications industry in the UK, and many other stakeholders who would be affected by the impacts of a major telecommunications disruption – such as community services, fire service, police, ambulance service.
The exercise involved 500 players throughout the UK and was run over two days allowing rehearsal of full shift changes of crisis planning and policy staff. Several organisations also ran local area exercises in their own environments requiring strong management and co-ordination from the Steelhenge exercise team.
Exercise Development
Initial planning required close liaison with all key stakeholders to reach agreement on a scenario that would meet the exercise objectives and identifying any assumptions. This was then translated into technical development of a Master Events List which depicted the impacts across all the UK networks as the disruption occurred.
As part of the preparation for the exercise, Steelhenge co-ordinated detailed technical modelling of the impacts of the proposed scenario to create a realistic event based against validated timescales and impacts. Other government departments also conducted their own impact analyses to build a clear understanding of the impacts of a telecoms disruption for the stakeholders within their remit (eg health, transport).
Training
A key component of the pre-exercise development phase was the delivery of training days and workshops to prepare crisis response staff for their roles and to raise awareness of the telecoms crisis response structures across government. These sessions were designed and delivered by Steelhenge’s telecoms and crisis subject matter experts; each was tailored to meet the exact requirements of the audience, their levels of experience and knowledge.
The Exercise
The exercise was delivered in November 2009. The full central government response machinery was enacted through the Government National Civil Emergencies Suite to allow as full and realistic simulation of reality as possible. Exercise play was run in real time and players were able to respond exactly as they would in a real crisis with no limitations. Live media was played through the Steelhenge media services team, with full 24 hour simulated news footage of the story, press conferences, online web simulated news and live reports from our mobile studio and journalists at the "scene”.
Post Exercise Reporting and Recommendations
The exercise not only successfully achieved its objectives but many players also commented on the great value added by the relationships and understanding gained by working with colleagues in other organisations during the pre-exercise development phase.
Player feedback was gathered and collated along with that from the experienced team of exercise ‘observers’ into a full post-exercise report with recommendations to continuously improve response and support the development of policy and UK resilience.
