Over the last few years, the Business Continuity Working Group has hosted a summer tabletop exercise as part of our annual “BCP-athon”. Members of the UofT community have joined us to work through two events: one related to a campus IT outage and another focused on a cyber security threat. (Our first tabletop’s theme was a pandemic, and was scheduled for March 13, 2020…and we all know how that turned out).

We are delighted to have been asked to expand the scope for this year’s exercise to incorporate our response to an incident – from the very beginning and thus to involve a broader, incident management-related participant list.

This year’s main BCP Tabletop theme is a Rogers outage – wifi/internet/cellular – mimicking the July 8, 2022, outage which stymied us for ~15 hours. Rogers’ Director, Business Continuity and Enterprise Risk Management has agreed to facilitate the tabletop.  Note: while the Rogers outage will be the main theme, there will be several more “injects” throughout the exercise, some unrelated to the outage but just as pressing, as there would be in the course of any incident.

The broadening of scope for this year’s Tabletop has attendees engaged from the moment of the incident, actively responding, managing and participating as the event unfolds.   For this year’s Tabletop, members of the BCP Working Group will be joined by members of the Office of Safety & High Risk (OSHR), University of Toronto Communications, the Offices of the President and the Vice-President & Provost, as well as colleagues from across the tri-campus who would normally be called upon to lead or support their areas during incidents.

We hope that you will consider attending the Tabletop on Tuesday, July 29, 2025 in the Lau Auditorium, Myhal Centre for Engineering Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 55 St. George Street. Please feel free to share this link with any colleagues who would normally be called upon to support your area during an incident.

For more details, and to register to attend, please go to the 2025 Incident Management Tabletop Registration Page. Please feel free to share this link with your colleagues.

The details so far:

1. Length: The Tabletop will be a 4.5 – 5.5 hour exercise
2. Date: Tuesday July 29, 2025 from 9am
3. Location: Lau Auditorium at Myhal – in person only
4. Invitees: Tri-campus colleagues who would normally be engaged in leading or supporting during an incident including, but not limited to representatives from: Campus Safety, divisional CAOs, Community Safety, Communications, EHS, Facilities and Services, Faculty and Academic Life, Finance, HR,  Legal, Student Life – all are welcome!

The Exercise (broad strokes):

• introduction from the Facilitator who will explain the ground rules.
• the exercise will be divided into parts to simulate escalation points
• at the beginning of each part, “injects” are provided to various participants via video, email and/or paper media.
• Questions may also be displayed on the main screen to prompt discussion.
• Incident Management Team members and relevant colleagues will individually discuss the information provided to them and determine their Action Plans

Our facilitator will be guiding us through the exercise using industry standards as a foundation; while activation steps may align with the current Crisis Framework, the Tabletop is our opportunity to identify gaps and exposures in our incident management processes. We will have Official Observers watching actions taken, identifying process gaps, and we may be recording the event for review and to assess lessons learned.