Documenting Your Drills & Exercises

You may remember our adage from our FSO and PSD courses that “If it’s not documented, then it didn’t happen.” This certainly applies to Drills & Exercises. Be sure to keep your documentation in a central location, such as an S&A Documentation Kit.

Drills and Exercises documentation is low-hanging fruit for a Coast Guard Inspector looking for compliance violations. It’s relatively easy to go through your records to find flaws. The first is to ensure that Drills and Exercises are conducted at the required frequency. For Drills, that means at least once every three months. For Exercises, it’s at least once each calendar year, with no more than 18 months between exercises. If you use an electronic system for your Drills & Exercises, we’ve found a best practice where FSOs print a copy of the Drill Log or Exercise Report and place it in their Documentation Kit.

For each Drill or Exercise, the documentation should include the date held, the FSP element tested (for Drills), a description of the Drill or Exercise, a list of participants, and any best practices or lessons learned that might improve your FSP. Describing the best practices or lessons learned is often the weak part of the documentation we see when we conduct facility security Audits. When I see “N/A” or “None” under best practices or lessons learned, it means to me that the person leading the Drill or Exercise failed in doing their job.

On a side note, when you find best practices or lessons learned in your Drills or Exercises, please share them with us at Seebald & Associates. We keep track of them and share them with our clients and students. They’re not attributed to you, unless you say it’s okay. We believe in this collaboration as a way to strengthen our Maritime Transportation System. We’ve started this compilation to augment our courses and build a “Good, Bad, and Ugly” session for our 2018 Facility Security Symposium.

That’ll do for this month’s blog topic. No blog next week as we turn to our families and loved ones to celebrate the holiday season. We at Seebald & Associates wish you the very best for safe, secure, and happy holidays – see you next year!