DELIVER!
With a fixed resource, delivering improvements is limited by the resilience of your IT landscape and the agility of your approach. This is the game everyone in IT should play!
About...
Agile, holistic IT service management
In IT service management, most organisations begin with a focus on incident management, restoring an active service to its agreed operational performance. However, it is easy to get stuck in a reactive "fire-fighting" mode.
To succeed, it is necessary to move past reactive to proactive, reducing the likelihood of incidents in the first place by focusing on the resilience of your IT landscape. This frees up resources to work on activities that create business value.
The game scenario
You are managing an IT service with a small DevOps team that are developing and implementing improvements. At the same time, you have to support requests from your users and resolve incidents as they arise from events. There are also some services that need to be managed collectively.
Your goal is to create as much business value as possible.
Running a game session
DELIVER! is an easy-to-play board game for up to 12 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.
Creating incidents from events
Events, from solution monitoring are either informational or exception events. Exception events generate priority 1, 2, or 3 incidents that need to be fixed in time.
Documenting solutions to incidents
Knowledge management is at play to allow you to update your wiki with the information you gained fixing an incident.
Creating resilience in your IT landscape
Problem management will help you to identify the root cause and remove the issue to create resilience.
Service request handling
From time to time, you get request from service desk which drain your resources if they have not been automated.
Continual improvement
You can develop automated request management or create value by implementing improvements in the backlog.
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.
Delivering an agile, holistic view of ITSM
Move past firefighting to deliver the business value your users deserve.
You may have reflected that you seem to be spending a lot of time fixing incidents and maintaining your SLAs, but things don't seem to be getting any better.
Playing “DELIVER!” introduces a cross-functional, agile, holistic approach to ITSM with a focus on actively reducing the likelihood of incidents through problem management.
You will be aiming to create and understand the best tactical approach to deliver the most benefit to your customers whilst continually improving the resilience of your IT landscape.
The gameplay progresses in a series of rounds with each round seeing input from the service desk and events, setting the operational challenges for the round.
"DELIVER!" develops a cross-functional understanding of the holistic nature of event, incident, problem, request, and knowledge areas of ITIL.
Playing the game, provides the basis to establish a practical tactical approach to prioritisation of activities, whether they be handling an incident, establishing a root cause or continuously improving the service.
The interactive nature of the game develops many soft skills including communications, teamwork, time management, and leadership.
In the game, each team is managing their own service along with its underlying systems and technical platforms. They are also supporting, from an operational point, other shared services, leading to a semi-cooperative approach in the gameplay. The players must continually improve their services whilst maintaining their support promise to their customers.
All of the operational activities put a heavy demand on the limited resources available to each team, and it is this aspect that leads to the development of a successful tactical approach.
