In the context of national and international civil protection exercises like EU MODEX and other formats a structured, well-considered and extensive evaluation plays a crucial role in documenting best practices and mistakes happening during those exercises. By noting lessons learnt evaluation is essential for a constant improvement in training efforts, thus promoting the capacities of response units in the European Union and its neighbouring countries for dealing with real disaster scenarios in a world challenged by an ever-increasing number of climate change driven hazards.

By now the quality of exercise evaluation has been highly diverse, based on the terms of the funding entity and the responsible players of exercise management. In most cases the evaluation was a task undertaken by the management unit, which led to a self-evaluation setting touching many aspects crucial for those kinds of exercises. Obviously, this concept did not produce as much valuable output for future exercises as hoped-for. Therefore, the European Commission started to fund projects like “IRONORE2019”, which highlighted an evaluation approach putting an independent organization in charge. This requires an open-minded error culture among the participating response forces on the one hand, but also produces far more significant results on the other hand.

INEGMA-E² is building upon this upcoming approach of independent evaluation and aims for a new level of exercise evaluation, which will meet high standards concerning documentation, replicability, and goal orientation. The entire project is based on three pillars:

1.) The development of an adequate and versatile evaluation methodology, addressing the different types of existing exercises – ranging from Tabletop and Discussions Based Exercises to Command Post and Full-Scale Exercises.

2.) Exploring the great number of existing tools, which can facilitate the data collection throughout the exercise process.

3.) The creation of an international pool of evaluators, which will be accessible by all institutions managing those kinds of exercises, to ensure the availability of highly skilled evaluators when needed.

A strong interconnection of all three essential fields - method, tool and network – is crucial to succeed within the project, hence setting new standards in exercise evaluation.

Project partners:

• DCNA
• Universität der Bundeswehr München
• Laurea University of Applied Sciences
• Austrian Institute of Technology
• ITTI
• BBK

 

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