Resilience in Practice: Elevating Your Testing Strategy

For many organizations, testing still happens once a year. A date gets set, a scenario gets written, the right people join the meeting, and a report gets filed. Often, the timing is driven by an audit or compliance deadline. Then the program moves on until the next annual exercise. 

That approach is out of sync with the modern dynamics of a business. Vendors change, systems are replaced, people move into new roles, and dependencies shift. A recovery strategy that was accurate early in the year may no longer reflect how the business works a few months later. 

This is where testing programs often lose momentum. The exercise may go well in the room, but the findings end up in a document that no one revisits. The same gaps show up again the next year because no one was assigned to fix them, no target dates were set, and no one had a reliable way to see whether the work was completed. 

Annual exercises still have value. They bring people together, create visibility, and help satisfy important governance expectations. However, there are more effective and efficient ways to help risk and resilience teams keep pace with business reality as it changes. 

The Right Test Depends on What You Need to Learn 

Not every exercise needs to be a large, high-pressure event. In fact, starting too big can backfire if the program has not validated the basics. The practical question is not, “What is the most advanced exercise we can run?” It is, “What do we need to learn next?” 

Different exercise types answer different questions: 

• Tabletop helps teams talk through a scenario, confirm roles, and understand how decisions are made. 
• Functional exercise checks whether a specific process or task can be performed under expected conditions. 
• Live exercise gives teams more confidence by testing recovery strategies in a realistic setting.  
• Scenario testing helps teams explore how disruptions can affect important business services, dependencies, recovery status, and impact tolerances. 

For a developing program, the answer may be simple: validate a contact list, test a notification process, or walk through one recovery procedure. Those smaller checks can be surprisingly useful.  

Consider a team that needed to know whether their crisis notification process would hold under pressure. They ran a 30-minute targeted test with the crisis communications team. They found that nearly a third of the contact list was stale, and two escalation paths led to people no longer with the company. No full tabletop would have surfaced that in the same way. They fixed the list, updated the escalation chain, and ran the test again six months later. It ran clean. 

For more mature programs, the question shifts from validating the basics to stress-testing assumptions. Teams at this stage often layer in simulations and automated testing alongside traditional exercises. A simulation can run at higher volume and frequency without requiring everyone in a room, helping teams see how a disruption would ripple across dependencies. That output helps teams prioritize where to invest in live exercises or more complex scenarios involving multiple functions and recovery strategies. 

Start with a Clear Objective 

“Test our plans” leaves too much room for interpretation.  

A stronger objective would focus on a specific outcome, such as confirming whether the highest-priority processes or services can continue to meet defined service levels when a critical application is unavailable. 

For example, a financial services company needed to test whether their payment processing function could sustain operations for four hours without their core transaction platform. That single objective determined who needed to be in the room, what evidence to capture, and what a successful outcome looked like. The exercise ran. They found a gap in their manual fallback process. They fixed it. The next exercise confirmed the fix worked. 

That kind of objective helps determine who should participate, what evidence should be captured, and how the team will know whether the exercise was useful. 

Findings Are Where the Work Really Starts 

The value of an exercise comes from what the organization learns and improves afterward. Even small gains matter. Closing one gap in a contact list, updating one stale recovery procedure, or confirming one workaround works can make a real difference when a disruption happens.  

After the exercise, findings should be written in plain language, reviewed, and prioritized. Each finding needs a real owner. That owner should define the remediation plan, set a target date, and provide updates until the work is complete. Someone also needs to monitor progress, because “assigned” is not the same thing as “fixed.” 

Here is what a high-value finding looks like in practice. During a tabletop, the team discovers that the documented manual workaround for their ERP system has not been updated since the platform was upgraded two years ago. The workaround references a process that no longer exists. That finding drives a real fix: the procedure gets rewritten, the responsible owner tests it, and the next exercise validates that it works. Readiness improves in a measurable way. 

The last step is easy to overlook: validate the fix. A later exercise should confirm whether the remediation actually worked. Otherwise, the organization may close the item on paper without knowing whether readiness improved. 

Executives and auditors do not just need proof that an exercise happened. They need to see what was tested, what changed afterward, which issues are still open, and how the program is getting stronger over time. 

Build a Year-Round Testing Program 

Mature resilience teams usually do not rely on one large exercise to carry the whole year. They build a testing rhythm that validates different parts of the program over time, moving from targeted checks to more complex scenarios as confidence builds.  

The sequence matters. Tabletops validate that people understand their roles and can make decisions under pressure. Functional exercises confirm that specific processes and procedures work as designed. Live exercises test recovery strategies in realistic conditions. Simulations stress-test assumptions at scale, surfacing dependencies and impact scenarios that manual exercises may not catch. Each type builds on the others. Together, they create a progressively more complete picture of where the program stands. 

Simulations are particularly useful for identifying where to invest in bringing people together. If a simulation reveals that a disruption to one system creates cascading failures across three business units, that is a signal to run a live exercise with all three teams in the room. Simulations do not replace human judgment, but they help teams spend their exercise time where it matters most. 

The payoff is visibility. Teams are no longer guessing which parts of the program have been tested. They can see which assets, procedures, and services have been exercised, where gaps were found, and whether those gaps were addressed. That clarity lets leaders make informed decisions about program investments. It lets auditors see a trajectory, not just a point-in-time snapshot. 

Moving from annual testing to a stronger testing program does not require changing everything at once. Start with the next exercise. Write a clear objective. Capture findings in language people understand. Assign every action to a real owner. Set a deadline. Monitor progress. Then use the next test to confirm whether the fix holds. Those habits, repeated consistently, help resilience teams close gaps before disruption turns them into larger problems. 

Want to go deeper on testing methodology? Read the whitepaper for a closer look at how dynamic planning and scenario-based testing work in practice. When you’re ready to see it in action, request a demo.