Planning and recording an exercise

An exercise is how a plan gets tested before an incident tests it. Training & Exercises keeps the plan for one, what happened while it ran, and what it showed, in one place. The after-action report then comes from the record, not from memory a week later.

Create the exercise

Press New Exercise, give it a title and pick the type: tabletop, drill, functional, full-scale, workshop or seminar. Calchis opens the exercise straight away. Every exercise in the list opens the same page.

1. Plan it

Fill in when and where it runs, the scenario players start from, and the objectives, one per line. Write objectives you can measure: “activate the EOC to partial within 60 minutes of notification” is something the after-action report can say was met or not; “test EOC activation” is not. Move the status from draft to scheduled to in progress to completed as it goes.

The HSEEP box is your own declaration that the exercise was designed and run to the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program. Calchis does not check it, and the page says so.

2. Injects

Injects are the master scenario events list: what players are told, and when, in minutes from the start (T+0, T+45m, T+2h). Each one records the message, its kind (a scenario update, a message, an event, a resource change, a communications failure or an escalation), and the action you expect.

While the exercise runs, tick Delivered as each inject goes out; the time is stamped for you. Under each inject, write down what the players actually did. That gap, expected against actual, is most of what an after-action report is for.

3. Participants

Add who took part, with their role and organization. A score from 1 to 5 is optional. If you give any, the report states the average of the scores given; a participant with no score is left out of it rather than counted as a low one.

4. After-action report

Generate draft builds a first version from the record: how many injects were delivered and answered, how many people took part, their average score, and whether objectives were written. It is a starting point built from counts, not an evaluation of performance. Edit the summary, strengths, areas for improvement and recommendations to say what the exercise actually showed, one item per line.

Save and finalize locks the report. A finalized report cannot be regenerated, so a sign-off is never replaced by a fresh draft. Reopen for editing unlocks it if you need to correct it.

Availability

Training & exercise management is part of the Agency plan — see pricing. Exercises belong to the account that created them.