Created by John Avery, age 5, future Emergency Manager
Little Johnny took to VTT like a fish to water, and has been creating some professional-looking tabletop displays. Here he developed a scene featuring the new vehicle types introduced in the latest VTT update. This one was created in less than ten minutes.
The Virtual Table Top – VTT™ is a web-based tool for conducting enhanced table top exercises. Facilitators and users can import custom background images, place terrain features, roads, hazards, and equipment on a 3D street grid to visualize the scenario and response actions.
Contact us for a free demo – Click here for an interactive overview of VTT™
vtt@mediatechinc.com
Some of the Benefits of VTT™:
Economical: Lower operational and training costs
Cost-Effective: No wear on resources or ancillary costs
Efficient: Increase number of fully trained personnel
Effective: Improve and maintain necessary level of skill
Comprehensive: All-Hazards, All-Agencies applications
Relevant: Train for 21st Century threats and priorities
High-Impact: Experience instills maximum retention
Customizable: Easily create objectives-based exercises
Practical: Gain experience using familiar scenes
Repeatable: Train and retrain for enhanced performance
Convenient: Train regularly with no operational disruptions
Measurable: Objective scoring and assessment
Compliant: NIMS, HSEEP
Secure: Train confidentially in a protected environment
Safe: Protect your most valuable assets – your People
Ft. Madison, IA: Windshear Damage
A needs assessment may reveal a wide array of concerns. Clearly you can’t design an exercise that effectively practices:
You will need to set priorities and make choices. It is important that the scope be clearly and narrowly defined.
There are five key elements of scope: type of emergency, location, functions, participants, and exercise type. The decisions you make for each of these elements define your scope.
Type of Emergency
An exercise is usually limited to one major event, although other secondary events might develop as the scenario unfolds. Hazards may be chosen for several reasons, including:
Location
Identify the location (a specific address) where the simulated event will occur. For tabletop exercises, select a place where the participant’s response could realistically occur, such as in the EOC.
Functions
List the operations that the participants will practice. Be sure that the procedures within a certain function are clear and narrowly defined. For example, to exercise a community’s alert warning system, the following actions might be specified:
Exercise Alert Warning System
Participants
After the most important functions or needs have been identified, you can narrow the list of participating organizations and individuals to those that are required to carry out the actions.
Ask yourself: Which organizations need to be involved to carry out the function(s) being tested? Which representatives from the identified organizations should be there?
For example, for a tabletop exercise in an EOC or other operations center, you would typically want policy makers, coordinators, and operations personnel. On the other hand, for a tabletop in an Incident Command Post, you would most likely want personnel who are knowledgeable in field operations and have some on-scene decision-making authority.
Blakesburg, IA, Tanker Truck Explosion, July 2011
MediaTech will present a web-based series of articles on Tabletop Exercise Design, beginning this week.
The tabletop exercise is essentially a discussion guided by a facilitator. Its purpose is to solve problems as a group. It is designed to elicit constructive discussion as participants examine and resolve problems based on existing operational plans and identify where those plans need to be refined.
The tabletop exercise, then, is the ideal method for
This series of articles will assume your organization has undertaken a thorough needs assessment and determined that a tabletop exercise is the next logical component of your comprehensive exercise plan.
Its fairly well known that computer-based training yields time savings of 35-45% over traditional classroom instruction. Adults read faster than an instructor can talk. Software will not digress or meander or spend class time on course management. This is known as compression.
What is less known is that the most visible impact on ROI is not from the obvious savings in wages but from savings in opportunity costs. An example of this is as follows:
A company needs to put 200 of their employees through a course in plant safety that takes one week. If the average hourly wage is $15 an hour then the wage cost of training alone (excluding travel costs and time, opportunity costs, instructor cost, etc) would be 200 X $15 X 40 = $120,000. If all other factors remain equal, a 40% reduction in time saves $48,000. This alone has significant impact on R.O.I., however this impact can be relatively small when compared to the effect of documented savings in opportunity costs. Opportunity costs are the cost incurred by the company when production or sales are reduced due to reductions in force. Thus, if the 200 employees produce 10 units a day, the total loss for the week is 50 units. If each unit then nets the company $5,000 in revenue, the total in lost revenue would be $250,000. Again if all factors remain equal, a 40% reduction in training time would net $150,000 in lost opportunity savings. This is approximately three times the savings in wages alone.
In addition to compression of training time, MediaTech’s web-based e-Learning products are available 24-7 and can be accessed by your employees at times that further reduce opportunity costs. Add to this the fact that training programs can be monitored and validated to a much greater degree as compared to traditional training, the value proposition of computer-based training products is clear.
MediaTech President John C. White is pleased to welcome new partner Gordon Miller III to the MediaTech Team. Miller, who will be assuming the role of CEO, has devoted more than 20 years to the pursuit of excellence in design and innovation. An accomplished designer and engineer in his own right, he first focused his attention on K-12 and higher education solutions. Since 1996, as founder and president of G3 Systems, Mr. Miller has developed a rapidly expanding base of mission critical government projects including efforts for the US Dept. of Defense, US Navy, US Army, US Dept. of Education, US Dept. of State and US Dept. of Homeland Security.
“I am very, very excited to join MediaTech, and delighted at the opportunity we have to bring synergies to the training market by leveraging our considerable shared capabilities”, said Miller, from his offices in Virginia. “All the pieces are falling into place. We expect great things from this team.”
White is similarly enthusiastic. “This is a great thing for our company. Gordon brings a lot to the table, and we expect to take full of advantage of his considerable expertise. I am excited by his vision for our future and looking forward to working with our partners at G3 to develop exciting new training products for our customers.”
Co-founder and Centerville native John (Rocky) White recently assumed full ownership of all MediaTech operations. MediaTech has been a member of the Centerville business community since the fall of 2003, maintaining an office in the Alliant Call Center Building. John previously served as Chief Operating Officer and managed the day to day operations at MediaTech’s Centerville office. MediaTech’s operations team has been developing leading-edge technology-based learning products since the dawn of the World Wide Web. MediaTech’s core business strategy is to provide superior education and training services and products to business and government clients.
