The Building Tech Tabletop: Rehearsing Outages Across Ops, IT & Tenants

Running a tabletop exercise for building technology isn't an abstract compliance tick‑box — it's how teams discover brittle assumptions before tenants notice. In this episode Alex interviews Michael Harrington on designing short, realistic exercises that cover network outages, power transfer hiccups, carrier loss, and interdependent system failures without derailing operations. We cover who to invite (facilities, IT, security, vendors, tenant reps), how to craft scenarios that expose decision points and single points of failure, and the tradeoffs between high‑fidelity drills and low‑impact rehearsals. Michael shares real commercial-property examples where exercises revealed ownership gaps, clarified escalation paths, and led to prioritized capital fixes. Listeners will get a practical checklist for running a 60–90 minute tabletop, measurable success criteria, common pitfalls to avoid, and concrete next steps to turn findings into documented, budgeted actions — all in a vendor‑neutral format for busy owners and operators.