Run this exercise with the people who will staff, maintain, secure, and govern the room. A polished wall is not an operations centre until roles, information, failure modes, and handover work under pressure.
Define mission and authority
List the operating missions, sites, jurisdictions, hours, expected concurrent operations, and authority relationships. Name who may propose, approve, activate, pause, terminate, and disclose information about an operation.
Draw a responsibility map for routine work and emergencies. Where a role depends on another organization, record the contact channel and the fallback when it is unavailable.
Build the shift model
Define minimum staffing, competence, fatigue limits, escalation coverage, and on-call expectations. Separate the air boss, vehicle operator, evidence keeper, technical duty, and external liaison even where one trained person holds more than one role.
Create a ninety-second handover: active operations, degraded services, unresolved alerts, weather or airspace change, pending approvals, evidence holds, and the next forced decision. Test it with a person who was not present on the previous shift.
Earn every surface on the wall
Place shared, time-critical information on the wall: common airspace picture, active operations, material alerts, communications status, weather, and critical video. Put detailed forms, private data, and low-frequency administration on operator desks.
For each panel, state its audience, owner, refresh source, stale threshold, and blank-screen meaning. Design the room so a failure is visible rather than replaced by a plausible frozen picture.
Write the minimum runbook set
Prepare concise runbooks for lost link, off-corridor flight, airspace incursion, injury, fly-away, degraded surveillance, identity-provider outage, power loss, public or media inquiry, and evidence preservation. Each begins with immediate safe actions, then notification and recovery.
Include the point where automation stops and an accountable person decides. Avoid instructions that depend on a single vendor contact or an internet connection unless an offline alternative is written beside them.
Drill the room
Run table-top drills first, then live simulations with synthetic data. Score detection time, acknowledgement, correct role ownership, safe action, communication, evidence completeness, and recovery. Record observer notes separately from the event log.
Repeat a failed scenario after remediation. A drill is complete when the corrected behavior is demonstrated, not when the meeting ends.
Accept and hand over
Commission against measurable criteria: views readable from assigned positions, alerts audible and distinguishable, clocks synchronized, degraded states obvious, communications reachable, backups restorable, runbooks available offline, and staff able to complete the core journey.
Deliver diagrams, configurations, asset inventory, training records, runbooks, drill results, open findings, credentials handover, and support contacts. The customer signs the accepted scope and owns the evidence.
Ninety-day review
Schedule a post-commissioning review after real shifts have exposed friction. Compare alert volumes, handover omissions, operational delays, overrides, and support incidents against the acceptance baseline. Update the room through controlled revisions rather than informal workstation changes.