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GTIME Exercise II is now scheduled for October 13, 2011.  See News & Events.

Make sure you reserve this important date in your calendar.

Reports for the GTIME I exercise are now available!!

See the new Exercise Reports page.

Check this page out from time to time to get the latest news from DRIE GTIME.


The Disaster Recovery Information Exchange (DRIE Toronto), the Building Owners and Managers Association Toronto (BOMA), SAFE Group, and the City of Toronto, are pleased to announce their ongoing strategic partnership to create the second wide scale exercise event across business and government in the Greater Toronto Incident Management Exercise II (GTIME).

The upcoming GTIME exercise on October 13th will both educate and challenge all participants regardless of their background. The impact of the speed of external communications and social media will test your ability to respond and communicate on various levels in a timely fashion, while conducting typical incident management and recognizing technological dependencies. Communications across various levels of government and business response will provide important input to the upcoming Trillium TransGuard III exercise regarding business response and requirements from government – Your input will affect joint Federal, Provincial, and Municipal exercises.

TransGuard is a joint federal-provincial exercise program that validates emergency management and security related plans and processes that prevent and respond to threats and attacks in southern Ontario (Golden Horseshoe). The TransGuard exercises are conducted in partnership with municipal governments, NGOs, and the private sector. Exercise Trillium TransGuard is a component of the Urban Transit Exercise Program, which is a federal government initiative to improve the readiness of the urban transit sector to respond to multi-jurisdictional emergencies.

The hands on exercise will be targeted at the resumption, recovery and restoration phases of plans. “Getting back to business”, Immediate response phase engagement will be deployed in advance of the exercise day, and participants will be required to arrive with some pre-work to contribute to the exercise outputs and will participate in enacting their plans to the extent best possible.

This is an educational hands-on exercise applicable to any business or government organization regardless of their location. It is a great opportunity to exercise your plan without the time and expense of designing your own exercise scenario, researching cross functional impact, providing exercise reports and debriefings.

Table monitors will facilitate discussion topics as the exercise progresses and the table top exercise will encourage participants to discuss cross functional issues and plan dependencies. Post exercise reports and blogs will be made available to all attendees as part of an on-going evolution as the Trillium TransGuard III exercise results are made available and the GTIME Whitepaper content is developed.

The Crisis Management role and mapping to the Incident Command System as part of your plan structure is a key objective for GTIME II.

Team Building and Educational Opportunity

The City of Toronto Office of Emergency Management, DRIE, Safe Group, and BOMA Toronto will moderate the event, ensuring that the challenges faced by participants are realistic, probable and valuable for real-life planning.
The facilitated workshop allows for an unprecedented opportunity to not only exercise and evaluate your own organization’s plan and to understand key integration, support requirements and communication points with critical community infrastructure, landlord/tenant relationships, and actions taken by all levels of government.

Organizations wishing to exercise their plan will be allowed to reserve a full table as their "EOC" (Emergency Operations Centre), while others will be assigned to collaborative environments which will assist them in understanding the importance of cross functional communications and multiple forms of communications in plan content. The exercise will be shaped on participant requirements.

Who should attend?
Business continuity planners, emergency managers, crisis communications planners, human resources managers, risk managers, property owners and managers, facility managers, asset managers, life safety teams, contractors, crisis management leaders.
 
Any member of your crisis management team or planning team can benefit from the new knowledge and thinking at this event. Extending the invitation to the entire team can solidify your commitment to preparedness and help them to build their skills and understanding of their role in a wide scale incident impacting your organization.

Forum participants will:

Update their planning and incident management skills with compelling knowledge of issues related to current technology and the impacts that communications can have on your organization’s ability to effectively enact their plan.

Expected Outcomes

•       Cross organizational silos
 
–       Help professionals to interact and develop relationships before an event occurs
 
•        Test inter-organizational communications:
 
–       Linkages within the city, province, external partners and business centers
 
–       Facilities managers, business continuity professionals and various levels of government
 
•       Understand social media issues (reputation)
 
•       Focus on longer term recovery
 
–       Includes new areas for consideration in your IT Disaster Recovery Plan
 
•       Improve understanding of the incident management system (ICS / IMS)

GTIME II will be held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Registration details will be available shortly and should be $125 - $150 for DRIE, BOMA and SAFE members.

Registration will include:

Continental breakfast and refreshments

Two speaker presentations

Interactive exercise incident management workshop

Luncheon and post event networking session

Post event debriefing

White paper, access to participant blog, on-going updates

Great Networking Opportunities


February 23, 2011

The upcoming GTIME exercise on October 5th will both educate and challenge all participants regardless of their background. The impact of the speed of external communications and social media will test your ability to respond and communicate on various levels in a timely fashion, while conducting typical incident management and recognizing technological dependencies. Communications across various levels of government and business response will provide important input to the upcoming TransGuard II exercise regarding business response and requirements from government.

The hands on exercise will be targeted at the resumption, recovery and restoration phases of plans. Immediate response phase engagement will be deployed in advance of the exercise day, and participants will be required to arrive with some pre-work to contribute to the exercise outputs and will participate in enacting their plans to the extent best possible. This is a hands on exercise.

Organizations wishing to exercise their plan will be allowed to reserve a full table as their "EOC" (Emergency Operations Centre), while others will be assigned to collaborative environments which will assist them in understanding the importance of cross functional communications in plan content. The exercise will be shaped on participant requirements. The Crisis Management role and mapping to the Incident Command System as part of your plan structure is a key objective for GTIME II.

September 27, 2010
 
Join for an update webinar on Wednesday, December 8th at 3:30 p.m. EST.  This webinar will outline how GTIME was formed and how its first exercise was planned.  We will walk through the scenario, the expectations, and actual results, as well as the future direction for GTIME's evolution.

August 15, 2010 - Summary Report Now Available
 
See the new Exercise Reports page to view or download the report. 
 
  

 
May 7, 2010
 
Just in case you have been wondering what has happened to GTIME over the winter, GTIME is alive and well.
 
Since the GTIME #1 exercise on October 29, 2009, there has been much work done by a core group from DRIE and BOMA to write a “White Paper” that described the details of the exercise and the results/comments of the participants. We are planning to present the findings of this first GTIME at WCDM next year.  The “White Paper” has reached the final draft stage and is going through one more reading.  We think you will find this to be a good read when it is released, following printing within the next few weeks.
 
We are currently planning a GTIME #2. Another exercise that is planned to be larger and greater that the first GTIME exercise.  The expectation would be to have the next event in the fall of 2011.  Are you interested?  A date for the next GTIME meeting will be set after WCDM and we expect that the meeting may be in September 2010.
 
In the past, GTIME has used the facilities of Michael Smith and the ReadySmith server.  We have re-located the GTIME information to a new home on the internet (you are looking at it now). To bring all of the GTIME information up to date, the following will be helpful:
  1. What would you like to see GTIME do in the future?
  2. Would you like to receive a copy of the GTIME #1 White Paper?
  3. Are you interested in helping with the activities of GTIME #2?
  4. What type of exercise should be considered for the next GTA-wide event?
  5. Do you have any special skills that you would like to volunteer during the planning and presentation of the next exercise?  We are looking for people that would be interested in volunteering in our Communication Committee.
Tell us what you think by contacting us.

Coming soon!  Final report on the GTIME #1 exercise conducted on October 29, 2010.

The Disaster Recovery Information Exchange (DRIE) in Partnership with BOMA (The Building Owners and Managers Association) and the City of Toronto conducted GTIME #1, the first Greater Toronto Incident Management Exercise, on October 29, 2009.
 
GTIME’s mission is to help ensure that any impacted government and business organizations are prepared to effectively recover from a wide scale business disruption or disastrous event. This was accomplished in a table-top exercise which will challenge all private and public sector businesses, providing them with invaluable insight into an emergency scenario so that you will be better prepared when one arises.
 
Participants coordinated emergency management, business continuity response, and resumption in the table-top exercise. During the session, they used state of the art evaluation technology where participants’ shared experience was captured, generating a written post event report.
 
The City of Toronto Office of Emergency Management moderated the event, ensuring that the challenges faced by all attendees wererealistic, probable and valuable for real-life emergency planning. 

Participants took the opportunity to discuss and reflect on new knowledge and networked with emergency management professionals and commercial real estate colleagues at the luncheon. Keynote speaker Jim Stanton, president of Stanton Associates described the eight fundamentals of The Stanton Method: critical information that people need in times of uncertainty.

Everyone came prepared to be engaged, educated and to become part of the team working to make the GTA a safer place to live and work.  Exercise participants incl;uded business continuity planners; disaster recovery planners; emergency managers; human resources managers; risk managers; property owners and managers; facility managers; asset managers; life safety teams; contractors; and their leadership.
 

 


 
 
 
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