Valerie Abend, director of Treasury's Office of Critical Infrastructure Protection and Compliance Policy, explains a planning committee involving major trade associations, regulators and large and small financial institutions is drafting the actual exercise scenario.

"We're in the process of developing a business case presentation so business continuity managers at credit unions can talk about it," she says.

"The exercise is meant to be flexible so small institutions all the way up to large institutions can decide how many resources they want to devote to their involvement."

Abend figures the exercise may involve a couple of hours every week. But again, there's flexibility. If you're a credit union with a dozen branches and you want to involve branches at some point, you can do that.

Pre-exercise information will be released in advance so financial institutions can begin to prepare, she says. Then, following the exercise, "We will take a look at the responses and come up with an after-action report to get some general idea of what we found."

Contact information will be separated from the results so the findings will be confidential. Conclusions will be grouped in broad bands such as size and geographic area so participants can see how their peer group fared.

"When we look at the results we will have some large generalizations about points where specific types of organizations may be having trouble and where they're doing well," Abend explains.

"This is a tremendous opportunity to test your plans. While this exercise is based on pandemic flu, the crisis you plan for may not be the crisis you face. The exercise focuses on major issues–HR issues, legal issues, transportation, information technology, health care and so on–that arise in almost any crisis."

Detailed information, including online registration, is available at www.fspanfluexercise.com.

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