Put Learning Into Practice

Scenario

The mission of your team is clear: launch a rocket with the MarsLander on board, bring it to Mars and collect valuable data for universities and research centres.

Your challenge is to support the Mission Center and help it achieve all mission goals. The Mission Director manages the Mission Center and leads a team of flight operation, navigation and communication experts, who run the flight plan in line with mission goals and agreements with customers and suppliers.

The Mission Support Team of support engineers, test engineers and change management resolves every issue that occurs during the mission. The Development Team builds and maintains the applications, features and fixes, with vendors supplying data communication and storage services. The Service Manager runs Service Design, Service Delivery and Service Improvement.

What you'll experience

This simulation explores how you can transform your current IT organisation into a more Agile and Lean one. Along the way you will work through questions such as:

• How can service teams help, and how do you create high-performing teams?
• How can we visualise our work using Kanban?
• How can we increase the flow of work?
• How can we integrate vendors into our services?
• How do we work more closely with development?
• How do we continuously improve our services?
• How do we become a flexible service organisation that responds quickly to changing demands?
• How do we become more customer focused and build that thinking into our teams?
• How do we manage workload end to end and reduce unplanned work?
• How do we increase customer and employee satisfaction?

Scenario

You are the Mission Control Center of NASA, and your aim is to support the crew through the mission. You must design your services, implement them, run them and apply continual improvement to make the mission a success. Across four rounds you face events, problems, changes and rising business demand, and you must apply ITSM best practice to come through. You will guide the crew through launch, the journey to and from the moon and a safe splashdown, all while meeting the strategic goals for the mission.

Objectives

The learning objectives depend on what your organisation is trying to achieve, where you are on your ITSM journey and the problems you are trying to solve. Typical objectives include:

• Learn how to apply ITSM best practice and grasp the essence of ITSM.
• Learn how to measure and improve your performance.
• Learn how to stay customer focused and set priorities by customer impact.
• Develop communication and team competences.

Scenario

Businesses are demanding ever shorter release cycles for new applications. Traditionally, Operations is seen as a barrier of lengthy controls and delays in provisioning production systems. DevOps is a growing movement to shorten development and deployment by integrating Development and Operations, but it needs a shift in mindset, behaviour and culture on both sides. Teams that were traditionally suspicious of each other must now work closely together.

The game is based on the book The Phoenix Project. Parts Unlimited is in trouble, with newspaper reports revealing its poor financial performance. The way forward is "The Phoenix Project", an IT-enabled business transformation owned by Retail Operations. The VP of IT Operations is asked to lead the IT department and make the project a success, but faces a huge backlog of issues, features and projects.

Your team plays different roles across Parts Unlimited. You might be Retail Operations, Human Resources or Finance on the business side, or the VP of IT Operations and members of the IT team who develop the applications and resolve the IT issues.

Your challenge is to apply DevOps principles in this serious business simulation. Across three rounds you work on the IT projects and issues to get "The Phoenix Project" finished on time, while the business keeps bringing new ideas and demands and outside events threaten to throw a spanner in the works.

Objectives

The simulation is tailored to your own needs and objectives, but in general it covers:

• How to apply DevOps principles in a real-life situation.
• How to balance your SLA requirements against delivering IT projects to plan.
• How to experience the value DevOps can bring to your business.
• How to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your IT department.
• How to create better flow in your teams.
• How to develop people's skills to work in a DevOps environment.
• How to show the business its part in making IT projects more successful.

Scenario

The owner of a Tokyo bank has decided to hold an exhibition of three famous and valuable objects at the Tokyo Museum. A criminal team called Oceans99 plans to steal them. Your team of museum owners, a transport manager, a security advisor and a project manager is responsible for delivering the exhibition. You have to develop an information security policy and security plans, run a risk analysis to identify threats, put measures in place and execute the project. You will transport the objects to the Tokyo Museum, but Oceans99 is not to be underestimated. After each round you receive feedback on how well you protected the objects and have time to improve. Will the sponsor see a return on investment, or will the exhibition become a drama?

Objectives

Each simulation is tailored to your own objectives, but in general it covers:

• Learn the key processes of information security management.
• Learn how to organise your teams around all the security roles.
• Learn how to deal with all kinds of security issues.
• Learn how to balance competing interests, operations versus security.

Scenario

Grab@Pizza is a successful company selling millions of pizzas every year, but six months into the year its sales are well below expectations. The CEO has asked the Business Manager for a recovery plan, a six-month strategy to bring sales and profit back on target. IT is a crucial enabler for reaching new markets, streamlining processes and reducing overheads. The IT department must organise itself to explore the business demands, turn them into IT strategy and set up IT Support, IT Operations and Change Management so the business succeeds by the end of the simulation.

Objectives

Each simulation is tailored to your own learning objectives and the problems you want to solve, but in general it covers:

• Learn how to align your ITSM processes internally to create business value while managing costs and risks.
• Learn how to engage the business in a dialogue of mutual understanding to agree and align priorities and decisions.
• Learn how to balance IT investments and decisions around value and outcomes while managing costs and risks.
• Learn how to use Jerry Luftman's theory on business and IT alignment to assess weaknesses and find improvement areas.
• Learn how to put effective communication and governance in place to make the right decisions.
• Learn how to translate business strategy planning into IT strategy planning.
• Develop an effective customer focus.

Scenario

We are in ancient Egypt. The Pharaoh has asked the leader of the steering group to build a pyramid to secure his journey to the afterlife, essential for his eternal existence. The steering group assigns a project leader and team to deliver it. The team must deal with all kinds of events and setbacks to keep the project within scope, quality, budget and time. That means managing work packages, risks, tolerances and all the other best-practice project management processes. Be prepared, though: the Pharaoh keeps arriving with new issues and ideas that affect the project.

Objectives

The simulation is tailored to your own needs and objectives, but in general it covers:

• Learn how to apply project management best practice and grasp the essence of PRINCE2®, PMI® and PMBOK®.
• Learn how to make sure the business case is realised.
• Learn how to stay customer focused and set priorities by customer requirements.
• Develop communication and team competences.