About

Situational awareness allows you to understand what is happening around you so that you can quickly respond to an unexpected and time critical event. Participants will learn the importance of situational awareness in a corporate environment in the context of the immediate environment, the nature of an event, organisations involved, stakeholder concerns and prioritising actions over a range of timeframes to enable the crisis management teams to take appropriate actions, communicate effectively and make decisions in a period of uncertainty to meet current and future objectives.

NEW SKILLS YOU WILL LEARN

• What is situational awareness in the context of crisis management?
• The importance of situational awareness and how it impacts the crisis response
• How to develop a common operational picture (COP) for the crisis team
• Collecting the right information in real-time during an incident
• How the crisis teams should process incident information effectively
• Communicating internally and externally with stakeholders during an incident

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

This course is highly relevant for anyone required to make important decisions during an unexpected and time-critical crisis event, which may include;

• Business Continuity Manager
• Risk and audit Managers/Analyst
• Emergency Response Coordinator
• Contingency/Emergency Manager
• Disaster Recovery Manager
• Assurance Manager
• Business Resiliency Manager/ Manager Resilience

Course Outline

COURSE OUTLINE

What is situational awareness in the context of crisis management

• Definition of situational awareness
• Situational awareness model/framework
• Benefits of situational awareness and the consequences of its loss
• Barriers to situational awareness
• Multi-organisational and international situational awareness

Role Play (2 hours)

• A case study role play of a major hotel fire to demonstrate what happens in a crisis and to identify a crisis team’s situational awareness needs
• Provide first-hand experience to draw upon for the remainder of the course

Crisis team structures and roles

• BCM concepts and what works in practice
• BCM framework and the role of the crisis team
• Strategic, tactical and operational functions in the crisis team structure
• Common pitfalls and problems
• Crisis team concepts in practice
• Achieving role clarity in a crisis team
• Situational awareness functions in the crisis team
• Tracking facts, activities and forward planning

Incident facts

• Gathering relevant facts
• Verifying the accuracy of facts
• Recording and monitoring facts
• Importance of minutes and logging

Crisis team actions

• Tracking and recording team activities
• Project managing actions and activities
• Situation Reporting

Situational awareness in practice

• Signals that situational awareness is lost
• Consequences of the loss of situational awareness
• Techniques to achieve and maintain situational awareness
• Tools: a help or hindrance?
• How to pre-plan and prepare to avoid surprises
• Establishing a Common Operational Picture (COP) in a corporate crisis management context
• Collecting information: what, how and the interpretation of information
• Forward planning: setting a recovery objective, strategy and actions
• Crisis communications: internal and external
• Requirement to practice using scenario based exercises

Facilitator

Matthew Collins

Matthew is a leading exponent in crisis management and business continuity planning with over 25 years full time experience from over 130 global client projects.  As a PricewaterhouseCoopers Partner Matthew headed up this specialist function and authored the unique FastTrack Methodology which has been implemented around the world and has been disaster proven on many occasions, including major organisations impacted by the recent Christchurch earthquakes.

Matthew’s training approach draws on his client project experience in a case study rich style that makes practical sense of the theory and reinforces the basic concepts behind the process. His extensive experience enables him to provide niche solutions for a wide range of industry sectors in both the public and private sectors.

In-house Training