Business Continuity Management Exercises - Event Tasks

[Matt Forder]

Hi community,

I'm working on implementing the Business Continuity Management product in ServiceNow and I have a question.

When creating an exercise there are 4 Exercise methods that can be selected:

• Simulation
• Tabletop
• Walkthrough
• Functional

However, according to the documentation, the Event Tasks tab is only displayed in the BCM workspace when 'Functional' is selected as the exercise method.

My question is... Why? What is the value of creating an exercise in the BCM app for the other 3 exercise methods?

I'm just trying to understand the rationale...

[Chris_Arbisi]

I am having the same issue and cannot find an adequate answer. If I make a tabletop exercise, how do I actually perform the review? There doesn't seem to be a way. I suppose I could make a functional exercise but just call it tabletop in the title, but that seems like a weird workaround, and it would be reported incorrectly.

[Matt Forder]

@Chris_Arbisi - It still puzzles me too; in the end we just accepted that only functional exercises include plan tasks and just adapted. 🤔

[vijetagajjar]

Hi @Matt Forder 

Here's my perspective: Exercises are essential to validate the BCM plan, ensuring all recovery tasks are documented, recovery teams are engaged, and recovery targets (RTO/RPO) are achievable.

While some organizations may not utilize Crisis Events, conducting exercises remains critical for reviewing the plan and preparing for potential disasters. Regular exercises, whether quarterly or annually, help maintain plan accuracy and completeness, especially as business processes and applications evolve iteratively with agile methodologies—adding new components and changing dependencies. Some organizations refer to this as a refresh process for BIA and plans.

In response to your question about different exercise types: they provide flexibility during validation. Early stages (Day 0 or Day 1) often involve initial review when not all task are well documented; thus, alternative exercise types are recommended. By Day 3 or 4, when plan becomes more precise, a functional exercise can help ensure recovery targets are optimized through review at task level and the addition or update of ad hoc tasks. The available exercise types and their definitions serve as guides; not all organizations or business units will require or use every type—this depends on their BCM maturity and journey of the client.

I hope this clarifies things.

Cheers,
VJ

[MallikharjunaV]

It works earlier to yokohama upgrade but now it fails to add plan related recovery tasks to Event tasks. Any script or configuration or KB to look for this fix?

[Pratiksha Lang1]

Hello @MallikharjunaV @Matt Forder @Chris_Arbisi 

Even I was looking for a solution on this and what I implemented for the same is I created one more field which had rest of the exercise methods apart from functional exercise method and kept the original exercise method default and read only to functional. 

So if user wants to select functional then anyway it will be read only and if user wants to select the other exercise methods then I kept one check which if checked then only the other field with other exercise methods will be visible to select and the original exercise method field with functional as default will be hidden.

In this case whatever happens the functional method will always be there in the backend and will generate the event task for exercise methods. 

We figured out the solution and also ServiceNow also gave the same solution when we raised a case with them. 

Happy to help if you need more clarity or we can also connect.

Please mark my answer as helpful if it helped you 🙂