Introduction

Business Simulation Duration: 1 Day

Marslander is a next generation ITSM business simulation. A business simulation is an interactive workshop in which teams of people work on challenging issues within a simulated environment. In a simulation each participant will play a role and has specific tasks, responsibilities and authority.

Do you recognize these challenges in ITSM?

  • How to apply the new ITIL 4 approach in your own teams?
  • A need to align ITSM practices with other end-to-end approaches
  • A need to demonstrate Value with ITSM
  • A growing demand to make ITSM more Agile.

We have used ITSM practices such as ITIL v3 to bring our Apollo 13 mission to the moon. Since then the world has changed. Technology has changed. Customer expectations have changed and there are more competitors able to provide space services. MarsLander is the next generation of space technology. Bringing a MarsLander to Mars requires a higher level of ITSM capabilities.

We need ‘ITSM the next generation’. There is a lot more software involved and more stakeholders and customers whose experiences we must take into account and manage. To effectively manage the service delivery in this ‘digital age’ we need to be more Agile and Lean and we have to work as end-to-end teams, ensuring software, hardware and services are in sync and able to respond rapidly to changes and new requests. ITSM capabilities such as ITIL® are still relevant but must be more responsive to a rapidly changing world – the words Agile and Lean enter the conversation. New approaches emerge such as VeriSM™ and ITIL®4. But what does ITSM Next generation mean? How do frameworks such as ITIL 4 fit into the end-to-end stream of ‘practices’?To fulfil all the demands of the business and customers, IT Teams must deliver fast, reliable, safe, error-free solutions. The increasing demand for digital services means we must increase the flow of work. More and faster is the business demand. But an increase in demand and speed brings with it the risk of mistakes. An error in space cannot be readily fixed by sending an on-site engineer. Quality and manageability must be built in. New software can be deployed in real-time, any time, as needed.

The way we need to work on the MarsLander mission is new. We are learning as we go to deal with those who must also be aligned and flexible to changing needs. This new way of working has also brought about a demand for multifunctional teams, a need to share knowledge, reduce hand-offs, prevent miscommunication and ensure all are aligned to realizing customer needs. This business simulation is about exploring and experiencing how you can transform your current IT organization into a more Agile and Lean organization based on ITSM Next Generation principles such as ITIL 4, VeriSM, Agile Service Management to name but a few.

In this simulation you will be ‘working’ in the Digital-service team of SPACE-Y. A company that sells data collected from their space missions to customers, such as Universities and Research Centers. The mission of your team is clear: “Launch a rocket with MarsLander, deploy it on Mars and collect valuable data for Universities and Research Centers”.

Your challenge is to work on achieving all of the mission goals. The Sales Director has direct contact with the customers and will sign new contracts. The Product Owner – digital services will manage the backlog of work to ensure mission goals are achieved. The Customer Support team will support customer feedback and Flight Operations will manage the flight. The IT Team will make sure Issues and Events are solved according to the Service Agreement and new offerings are integrated into operations practices. Requests and Features must be built and released on time and Customer Feedback dealt with as fast as possible to guarantee high customer satisfaction scores.

Application Development will build software to support new and changing business and customer demands, and at the same time will fix issues if they are related to software errors. This team will be supported by the Vendor who is delivering data storage and data support services.The Service Manager will manage the continual improvement activities and will make sure that new and existing services deliver the required value.Unfortunately, our capacity to work on creating value is partially blocked by ‘waste’ like supporting legacy systems, work arounds, lack of knowledge and manual test and release procedures.

Your challenge is to balance between delivering value and continually improving your services in an Agile way.

  • What is the essence of ITSM Next generation?
  • How can we increase speed by improving flow of work?
  • How can we integrate vendors into our services?
  • How to work closer together with development?
  • How to continuously improve our service by using the principle of ‘Minimal Viable Services’?
  • How to become a flexible service organization that responds rapidly to changing demands?
  • How to become more customer focused, and develop this ‘customer thinking’ into our teams?
  • How to effectively manage workload (end-to-end) and how to reduce unplanned work?
  • How to increase customer and employee satisfaction?
  • How to use ITSM Next Generation capabilities to deliver business Value?
  • How to apply continual improvement as an end-to-end capability?
  • How to use the principle of ‘Co-creation’ to design and transfer new services?
  • Employees of IT (Operations) teams can explore how a more service oriented way of working can make their work more enjoyable and better.
  • IT managers and team leaders can learn how to coach and facilitate their teams towards high performing teams.
  • Development teams can experience how to work together with IT Operation teams.
  • Business roles can experience how their roles may change if the organization starts to work in a more Agile and Lean way of working
  • ITSM specialists learn what can be the value of working in an Agile and Lean way; how to make ITSM practices such as ITIL® and VeriSM™ more responsive and fit for use in this new environment of rapid, unpredictable change in which solutions must be deployed rapidly, yet safely.
  • IT Operations teams can learn to take the next steps towards alignment with the DevOps philosophy and ITIL® Practitioner guiding principles.

Marslander is a great add-on to an ITIL 4 Specialist or Strategist module course.

Since this simulation is aimed at exploring and experiencing a new way of working, this simulation does not require any specific knowledge to participate. We will introduce any relevant ITSM Next Generation theory such as ITIL 4, VeriSM or Agile Service Management between rounds as appropriate in line with the required learning

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