From Athens to Mars

MarsLander? is a business simulation designed by GamingWorks, the developers of Apollo 13 and The Phoenix Project. It is a powerful way to stimulate a new way of thinking and working within the IT organisation. It uses concepts from ITIL 4 and helps employees better understand how to improve a more traditional approach to Service Management towards a more Agile Service Management approach. This is not a big bang but a series of small incremental steps and based on their assessment of what is most likely to succeed.

This simulation was organised as a pre-conference workshop before the 11th annual ITSM Conference in Athens. The workshop was delivered by GamingWorks’ partner Smalley.IT. One of the other workshop leaders, Robert Falkowitz, participated in the game and also shared his Kanban expertise.

MarsLander simulates launching a rocket that takes the MarsLander vehicle to Mars and collects valuable data that is sold to universities and research centres. The team comprises various roles: flight operations, sales director, customer service, product owner, dev and ops practitioners, service desk, a vendor, and a service manager who uses ITIL 4 concepts to continually improve the team’s performance. Various ITIL 4 concepts were directly or indirectly referred to by the team, for example the value stream of activities that are needed to translate demand into products and services that co-create value with and for the service consumer.

The full mission comprises seven sprints of work. In this short ‘taster’ of the game, two sprints were played, with frequent reflection and improvement of the way of working. At the end of the workshop, the participants reported the five main takeaways, followed by some comments by the facilitator:

• The power of visualising work, for example with a Kanban board, so that the various kinds of work can be prioritised
• The need and ability to ‘sell’ IT improvement initiatives to the business stakeholders
• The value of formalising knowledge in order to be able to solve issues
• Proper communication between teams
• Alignment of teams to the organisation’s mission and objectives

Work can be divided up into

• Planned operations
• Unplanned operations
• Planned improvements to the products and services (‘product backlog’)
• Planned improvements to the organisation and way of working

It's all work and it has to be prioritised and scheduled, particularly improvements, otherwise they will be overruled by the pressure of daily work.

Some improvements create value, for example by adding features to a product. Other improvements focus on eliminating defects that were consciously or unconsciously built into the product while building or improving it. The term ‘technical debt’ is often used to denote these defects. The unplanned incidents that the defects cause, can be seen as the ‘interest’ on the technical debt. Work spent on eliminating defects can be seen as ‘repayment’ of the loan. Technical debt is not necessarily a bad thing – it is a legitimate instrument that enables you to launch a product quicker. But you have to be able and willing to pay the interest.

Regarding ‘selling’ the value of IT to business stakeholders, an analogy can be drawn with the film The Wolf of Wall Street. In this black comedy film, Leonardo DiCaprio plays a stockbroker of dubious morals. In one of the scenes he plays a motivation speaker talking to an audience who have come to learn how to sell. In order to show them how sales works, DiCaprio pulls out a pen and going around the room, thrusts it in their faces, one by one, with the instruction “Sell me this pen.”. As each one takes the pen from him, they fumble through a sales pitch: “It’s an amazing pen, for professionals. It’s a…” DiCaprio grabs the pen impatiently and gives it to the next guy. “It’s a nice pen. You can use this pen to write down your thoughts from…”. Next feeble attempt: “Well, this pen works and I personally love this pen…”. They just don’t get it.

It’s similar in IT. We tend to focus on things like functionality, availability and performance. From an inpatient executive’s point of view, he or she only wants to know how your stupid IT solution is going to affect the bottom line. Is it going to reduce the cost of business operations or lower capital expenditure? Is it going to contribute to more sales, for instance by opening up more sales channels? Is it going to keep both sales and prices high by improving customer experience and therefore loyalty? Is it going to generate new products and services by enhancing the innovative capabilities of the enterprise? Cheaper business, more business, better business, different business. Or any other issue that threatens their status, bonus or career prospects. That’s what matters.