In May 2008, Calytrix Technologies (Australia) provided exercise planning, assessment and after action review support for Vital Prospect 2008 (VP08) using Mentor.

Calytrix Mentor™ is a web-based Training Management and Readiness Assessment system for conducting individual and collective/team training, recording results and knowledge, and generating reports and trend analysis. Mentor captures the whole training life cycle, from planning to execution through to generating reports/After Action Reviews, in a standardised and repeatable manner.

VP08 is a bi-annual cross-site virtual training event executed by the ADFWC and conducted in Williamtown (NSW) and Enoggera (Qld).

The exercise was a great success and for the first time, through Mentor's Activity Rating Watch report, continuous live feedback was available from the Observers and Evaluators reporting in Enoggera, allowing the Williamtown based EXCON to update their responses in real time. EXCON was therefore able to develop the ability to continuously adjust the exercise stimulus to achieve the training objectives.

Based on Observer/Evaluator feedback from the field, a number of new features were incorporated into Mentor during the exercise:

• Visual assessment 'guides' for the Mentor Data Entry Tool, which allow an evaluator to more intuitively locate events for which they have been assigned assessment responsibility, and also keep track of events for which assessment has been completed or is still outstanding.
• A mini 'live calendar', also for the Mentor Data Entry Tool, which allows evaluators to easily track which events are currently active, and quickly navigate to the associated assessments and measures.
• The Activity Watch report, which provides live notification and inspection of Observer/Evaluator comments as they are received. This allows minute by minute refinement of exercise activities since EXCON is now able to react in real time to event outcomes and make adjustments to ensure that desired learning outcomes are achieved.
• The Ratings Overview report, which provides a simplified live view of the status of events (upcoming, underway, complete), and instant one-click generation of a Word document summary of event details and evaluation from live data.
• An experimental but largely complete ADFAADS style functionality for Mentor was also developed during the course of VP08. This allows Observers and Evaluators to flag events with issues, assign responsibility for the resolution of an issue and track outcomes, providing complete issue tracking cycle coverage. The new feature overcomes many shortcomings of the current ADFAADS system which has an ad-hoc information distribution system and little or no real time feedback capability.

For more information please contact support@calytrix.com