Stress-Testing Your Business Continuity Plan: What Organizations Can Learn from Tabletop Exercises
Key Highlights
A business continuity plan isn’t proven until it’s tested.
Tabletop exercises move Business Continuity Plans from theory to practice by revealing critical gaps, “single points of failure,” and infrastructure vulnerabilities—before an actual disruption puts people, research, or operations at risk.
Tabletop exercises strengthen both operational resilience and audit readiness.
Regulatory bodies and partners (including the FDA, ISO, customers and insurance providers) increasingly require evidence that disaster plans are actively tested. A well-documented TTX, culminating in an After Action Report (AAR), provides the credible proof auditors need to see that your organization is prepared for real-world disruptions.
A well-facilitated tabletop exercise builds cross-functional confidence and clarity.
Engaging stakeholders across departments in a no-fault, scenario-based discussion improves role clarity, decision-making, and coordination.
6 Minute Read
If your biotechnology organization has a thoroughly developed business continuity plan (BCP), you might think you’re well prepared for disasters or operational disruptions. However, how can you really know your plan will work?
While there’s no foolproof way to ensure your research facility or commercial laboratory is 100 percent safe from vulnerabilities and disaster — we can’t predict the future, after all — you can test your plans and demonstrate that they would work in a disaster scenario. Tabletop exercises (TTX) are an effective method for testing your BCP and identifying critical gaps before a crisis occurs.
What is a Tabletop Exercise?
A TTX is a scenario-based discussion designed to simulate an emergency situation. While BCPs identify and mitigate single points of failure within an organization and its supply chains, TTXs test the effectiveness of these plans by simulating specific scenarios, such as testing emergency-notification systems or responding to natural disasters such as a hurricane or flood or wildfire. These exercises can be conducted quarterly or annually depending on the organization’s needs.
Under a facilitator’s guidance, employees are led through an exercise to identify emergency-incident response and recovery procedures. The idea is to ensure all necessary parties are trained and familiar with the roles, procedures, and responsibilities during and following an event like a natural disaster, technology or power outage, or supply-chain disruption. Organizations then can develop or refine their emergency plans based on lessons learned from such exercises.
Why TTX are Important
Organizations like hospitals complete TTXs and emergency drills frequently as part of their regulatory requirements. Yet, even if your organization isn’t susceptible to regulatory penalties, testing your BCP is the only way to discover how and where they fall short — before something more serious than a trial scenario occurs.
By utilizing a TTX as a realistic representation of potential threats your research or manufacturing facility might face, you can better ensure that you have a thorough plan in place to keep personnel safe and protect your property, product, investment and reputation. With the facilitator’s feedback, you can update your policies, plans and procedures to address any gaps or misunderstandings.
This is especially crucial for commercial laboratories or research facilities that have sensitive materials or research animals to consider. A power outage or significant weather event could endanger your research or manufacturing work and assets or affect the safety of animals in your facility. Your emergency plans need to account for these variables, and a TTX can help identify any plan inconsistencies as well as identify proactive measures such as establishing off-site cryostorage for cell lines, tissues, RNA, DNA, plasmid constructs or antibodies.
TTXs can uncover vulnerabilities related to your organization’s infrastructure. Frequently we find that organizations don’t have enough emergency generator power or that the generators are located in a flood-prone area. Lacking adequate cybersecurity or redundancy for internet connectivity are other common issues.
Another compelling reason to invest in TTXs is the audit landscape. Your business may be subjected to audits – such as a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspection, a Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) or European Medicines Agency (EMA) review, a Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) or International Organization for Standardization (ISO) audit, and customer or insurance assessments.
Auditors increasingly want to know not only that you have a BCP, but that you’ve tested the plan. A well-documented TTX provides exactly that — clear, credible evidence that your organization doesn’t just write plans, it actively tests and strengthens them.
Tabletop Exercise, What to Expect
If you’ve never completed a TTX, the process can seem a little overwhelming especially for employees. But it’s worth remembering that a TTX is a “no-fault” exercise — informal, collaborative, and designed to help your team learn.
The facilitator will start by reviewing your BCP and setting clear objectives. Depending on your needs, the exercise can be narrow — such as testing your emergency notification system — or much broader, like walking through a natural disaster response and its ripple effects on your operations. Most TTXs work best with three or four focused objectives to complete the session within one to two hours.
From there, the facilitator develops a guided scenario for participants. An organization in a coastal location, for instance, might begin with a hurricane approaching landfall. If flooding blocks access to the facility and supply deliveries stop, how would your team respond? The facilitator prompts discussion and asks targeted questions tailored to your operations.
As the scenario unfolds, new complications are introduced — road closures, extended power outages, water contamination, staffing shortages — to reveal gaps, stress-test decision-making, and assess the overall strength of your plan. At the end of the exercise, the facilitator leads a debrief to review what worked well and where improvements are needed.
Finally, you’ll receive an After Action Report (AAR) from the facilitator that summarizes key insights, documents lessons learned and outlines specific corrective actions along with a timeline for addressing them.
How to Prepare for a Tabletop Exercise
To get the most out of the TTX, there are a few things your organization can do to prepare in advance.
- Send out a communication to staff to explain the purpose of the TTX and how they can help to maximize its success. Emphasize that this is meant to be a learning exercise and there is no need to be nervous. Encourage everyone to participate in the discussions and be prepared to describe their role in responding to the incident.
- Ensure representatives from every key department in the company can attend. More than just your director of facilities and security, you should also plan to include your communications department, IT, environmental health and safety, supply chain, manufacturing, laboratory operations, customer support and anyone else who would have a role in the event of an emergency, depending on the purpose and functions of your operation.
- Have all participants read over the emergency action plan or business continuity plan to familiarize themselves with procedures, paying particularly close attention to department-specific plans.
By enlisting the assistance of a facilitator to conduct your TTX, you can benefit from a perspective that is outside your organization, but still an expert to the life sciences industry. Taking the time to explore, assess and analyze your emergency infrastructure and procedures will give your staff the knowledge and confidence they need to address a crisis, should one occur.
If you need an expert facilitator to help plan and conduct tabletop exercises for your team, contact us today.
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