Find out more about our STABILITY board game
Create and use knowledge to generate stability and value through root cause analysis.
Incidents, problems, and continual improvement
Behind the scenes, the service desk is receiving calls from your users in the company's factories. These result in tickets being raised for either service requests or incidents. And so it begins...
You will continually improve your service, solving incidents and problems to create stability, and gathering knowledge along the way to further improve. You will also cultivate your influence within the organisation through supporting other services.
The game scenario
You are managing your own IT service and also helping to support a couple of jointly managed services. You are trying to reduce the number of incidents you receive by ensuring that the stability of your service offsets the instability of the technical platforms on which it relies. Your customers are submitting change requests for the service and they want the changes implemented quickly. Finally you are looking to develop the service through two new releases.
Key features of STABILITY
Resolve incidents
If your service's stability is too low you are sure to get an incident, either major or minor.
Document known errors
Knowledge management is at play to allow you to document known errors with the information you gained resolving an incident. As you create more knowledge about your service you are able to accomplish more work.
Problem management to increase stability
Problem management is critical in identifying the root cause of issues that affect the stability of your service. By removing the issue, you increase the stability of your service's system, and also reduce the instability of the associated underpinning technical platform.
Continual improvement
As well as developing the next two releases of your system, you have improvement activities that come to light as you gain more knowledge.
Customer change requests
From time to time, you receive request from your consumers to improve certain aspects of your service's underlying system. There is a limited amount of time for you to act on these request before it starts to impact the business value of your service.
Leveraging an agile approach
You are continually reviewing the activities that need your attention and dynamically prioritising them to achieve the best business value both in the short term and for the future to ensure that each sprint delivers the maximum business value.
STABILITY is a semi-cooperative game, which means that players need to engage with each other during the game.
Whenever new learning is involved, some within the group will understand quicker than others. The choice to help each other to understand so that collectively the group is better equipped, ticks many of the soft skills areas. The game is a collective journey of understanding and discovery.
Key soft skills covered by STABILITY
Communication
Closely associated with the teamwork aspect and an enabler of success is the ability to communicate. This necessarily includes the ability to listen
Teamwork
There are two levels of teamwork incorporated into the game: those playing on the same team and the group of all teams.
Leadership
It is often the case that multiple avenues for progression are available, and it is here that leadership plays a role. Players must agree on a common cause of action that benefits both their own team and the whole group
ITIL practices featured in STABILITY
Incident management
Events received from Monitoring & Event management will be considered as exception events if there is insufficient resilience in your service, and generate an incidents. Incident management sets out to minimize the disruption caused to the service in line with the agreed service level. Incidents are prioritised P1, P2 or P3, with P1 incidents requiring immediate action. The clock is ticking and each round, any unresolved incidents become more urgent.
Knowledge management
As you resolve incidents you can take extra time to create a knowledge article to document a known error. This will help future incident resolution go smoother and also can pave the way for future problem management.
Continual improvement
You are trying to create business value through continually improving your service. You have a backlog of improvements that you have already identified but can visit your users to find out what's really important for them.
Problem management
To secure a more reliable performance from your service you may choose to investigate in depth, one of the areas to which has previously been added a knowledge article. This takes a concerted effort but results in a more resilient service.
Example value streams
Increase IT stability
This tactical value stream is directly associated with problem management in that the root cause of issues are established and removed. This leads to greater stability both in the specific service but also in the associated underlying technical platform.
Within the game, the stability concept is designed and visualised to be readily understood.
Process customer change request
Each change has a perceived or actual value to the business and, conversely, has a negative value if not implemented in a timely manner. Periodically, change requests are received from the customer base and need to be implemented in a timely manner, otherwise there will be a a perceived negative business value.
Release development and management
As a service owner you strive to maximise the business value created through your solution. The release cycles are fixed so it is up to you to ensure that the solution is ready and tested ahead of release. Releasing without testing will impact the stability of the system and, by extension, your service.
Get a copy of STABILITY or play online
Print to order
The game is available to purchase online. It is printed to order so may take a few weeks to arrive.
The games are produced in the US.
Running a game session
STABILITY is a highly detailed simulation board-game for up to 8 players. It is recommended to allow 2 hours for the game itself and a further hour for initial setup and post-game reflections and discussions.
Given the detail of the game, there will likely be lots to discuss so it would be advisable to extend the post-game reflections, if time permits.
Minimal use of plastics
as much as possible, we have attempted to minimise the amount of plastic used in our games with the majority of components being card or wood.
The only plastic in STABILITY are the dice and the bags used to store components.