5 Pro Tips for Organizing an Effective Team Sim

Whether you’re running a big or small event, a one-off, or a regular program of technical exercising, strong planning paves the way for a great exercise experience. While scheduling a Team Sim exercise in the Immersive Labs platform is very straightforward, I’m sharing a list of recommendations and tips for making sure your exercise goes the extra mile:

• Define exercise objectives - Know the purpose of the exercise to keep a laser focus and stop scope creep, which can dilute the exercise experience and learning takeaways. Is this a fun exercise with the aim of encouraging engagement, or is it a capability assurance exercise? Knowing your objective is essential for effective planning. For example, you would perhaps provide more guidance and hints during the former example.
• Block out calendars in advance -  Identify your participant list as early as you can and send placeholders out to ensure the team’s availability. The more advance notice, the better. At a minimum, provide two weeks’ notice, but ideally one month. In some large-scale cases, whole Team Sim exercise programs are planned and booked out over 6 months in advance.
• Host a briefing session - These sessions provide a great chance to set the expectations and objectives of the exercise, communicate important exercise information, answer any questions, and, most importantly, get the team excited about it! We recommend organizing a briefing call the week before the exercise is due to begin.
• Run a Systems Test - The last thing you will want to deal with when your exercise launches is any dreaded technical issues. Make sure you run a systems test early in the planning stages, leaving plenty of time for your organization to make any required configuration changes. You can find system requirement details here.
• Assign Preparation Labs - Some of the catalog exercises may utilize security tooling that your organization may not use daily. I believe in the benefits of vendor-agnostic learning when it comes to skills development, but understand the frustrating barriers of unfamiliar tools when trying to progress. If you have access to our hands-on labs, there are preparation labs available tailored for each catalog exercise. Assign these to participants a minimum of two weeks prior to the exercise.

Tried and tested, taking the steps above will ensure clear expectations from your exercise participants, and a smooth lead-up to your exercise day, playing a big factor in making it a success!