The Phoenix Project – DevOps Simulation
The “The Phoenix Project” Simulation game is an interactive learning experience based on the novel “The Phoenix Project.” It immerses participants in a scenario where they navigate IT challenges, such as bottlenecks, communication gaps, and resource constraints, to understand and apply DevOps principles effectively in a simulated business environment. Through role-playing and decision-making, players learn valuable insights into improving collaboration, workflow efficiency, and overall project management within IT teams
Duration of the simulation: 1 day
Number of participants: 8 – 12
Delivery format: Virtual and classroom
Note: The mentioned price is for a group of 8 to 12 students
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Justin Woo, Petronas DigitalThe Phoenix Project – DevOps Simulation
Businesses increasingly require shorter release cycles for new applications. Historically, “Operations” has been viewed as a hindrance due to its extensive bureaucratic controls and delays in setting up production systems. The Phoenix Project – DevOps Simulation addresses this by streamlining development and deployment processes and merging Development and Operations. However, this necessitates a change in mindset, adoption of new behaviors, and a cultural shift in both Development and Operations teams. Despite their past mistrust, these teams now need to collaborate closely. Nonetheless, many companies face challenges in implementing DevOps practices and transforming their culture accordingly.
Why the DevOps Simulation?
- DevOps is not that difficult to understand, but it has a huge impact on the way people need to behave.
- DevOps is often seen as a technology solution – automated coding, deployment, testing.
- DevOps is not a framework or method. It is an approach, a philosophy based on principles.
About the “The Phoenix project” Simulation game
The simulation game is based upon ‘The Phoenix Project’ Book. Parts Unlimited is in trouble. Newspaper reports reveal the poor financial performance of the organization. The only way forward to not only save the coBookCovermpany but to make it competitive and profitable is “The Phoenix Project” which represents an IT enabled business transformation, with Retail Operations as the business owner of this project. The VP of IT Operations is asked to take the lead of the IT department and ensure that “The Phoenix Project” will be a success. But the VP of IT Operations is facing a tremendous amount of work. A huge backlogs of issues, features and projects.
Your team will act in different roles within the Parts Unlimited organization. You can be Retail Operations, Human Resources or Finance – playing the Business roles of the company. Or you can be the VP of IT Operations or other members from his IT Team that needs to develop the applications and solve the IT Issues.
Your challenge is to use the DevOps principles and apply them in this serious Business Simulation. In three rounds you will work on the IT projects and IT issues and ensure that “The Phoenix Project” will be finished on time. But, beware, the business keeps coming with new ideas and demands and external developments outside your control can also throw a spanner in the works.
- Duration of the simulation: 1 day
- Number of participants: 8 – 12
- Basic expertise: No basic understanding required
This simulation is ideal for in-house and team training purposes. For further details and information, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email or live chat.
Watch DevOps Explainer Video
Registration
This simulation is ideal for in-house and team training purposes. If you have any specific questions or need assistance with organizing an in-house training workshop, feel free to contact us for more information or guidance via email or our live chat.
Note: The mentioned price is for a group of 8 to 12 students. You can specify your preferred date during checkout, and our team will get back to you within 24 hours to confirm the date.
| Image | Name | Price | Buy |
|---|---|---|---|
 | The Phoenix Project – DevOps Simulation | €4,300.00 |
The Simulation
The Simulation starts with the newspaper article about the dramatic situation of Parts Unlimited.
Round 1
Round 1 is a practice round. Students will receive some projects, features, and issues so the team can start slowly with just a minimum of workload.
Round 2
In Round 2, the team faces a huge backlog of IT-related issues such as incidents from Sales, HR, and Finance users. There is a tremendous amount of work, but there’s no clear overview of all the work, what it is, why it’s needed, and what will happen if it isn’t completed. IT Support cannot deliver agreed Service Levels and faces demands to fix incidents faster. However, they need capacity from IT Development, which is tied up in new projects. IT Development has difficulties finishing all business features and projects since they have no clear understanding of the business priorities and the business demands are too many for the limited number of development resources. Another issue is the Testing Team that seems to find lots of serious issues in the new applications or systems that will cause serious business impact…groan!
In order to deal with this, the team must create a FLOW within the complete delivery chain. They must collaborate and work as an end-to-end team, manage conflicting work demands, and ensure the work goes through the chain without bottlenecks, delays, or rework.
The team will manage the work using Kanban boards, post-its, and good communication.
In DevOps terms, the team will have explored what is called the ‘First way.’
‘The outcomes of putting the First Way into practice include never passing a known defect to downstream work centers, never allowing local optimization to create global degradation, always seeking to increase flow’
After this round, we will reflect on what happened, what went well, what needs improving, exploring what this has to do with DevOps theory and how we can improve our work using DevOps principles. The team will have time to implement the learning outcomes in the next round.
Round 3
Round 3 is more challenging. The CFO comes in with some serious SOX-404 compliance issues that MUST be solved.
It also looks as though the salaries may not get paid on time, which will cause union issues and could hit the newspaper headlines! In the meantime, Retail Operations is becoming increasingly concerned about The Phoenix Project that’s facing serious delays and issues, made even worse by the fact that revenue projections have been communicated to the financial newspapers.
Besides this, there is still the backlog of features and issues from the previous round that required quick solutions. There are some new projects from HR that must be implemented on time. IT Support is facing serious issues with the SLA, and the whole IT Team is reaching a breaking point. But the flow in the team will make life easier surely!?
The team will now learn how to use the flow and add a serious feedback loop into the delivery chain. The teams are working better and better and as a result, we hopefully see the revenue growing and stock price rising.
At the end of this round, we review again, look at the DevOps principles, and see which improvement suggestions will make the last round the best of the day. In DevOps terms, the team will have explored what is called ‘The Second way.’
‘The outcomes of the Second Way include understanding and responding to all customers, internal and external, shortening and amplifying all feedback loops, and embedding knowledge where we need it’.
Round 4
The last round is the most important round. The last moment to plan the final activities and projects in the different teams of IT Operations and IT Development. It’s now a matter of setting the right priorities and making the right decisions. The team now needs to learn how to introduce short feedback loops between the steps in the flow, rather than testing at the end of the cycle. In this way, they reduce the risk of the change not being approved and avoid creating rework and delays in projects that are business-critical.
In DevOps terms, the team will have explored what is called ‘The Third way.’
‘The Third Way is about creating a culture that fosters two things: continual experimentation, which requires taking risks and learning from success and failure and understanding that repetition and practice is the prerequisite to mastery’
At the end of the session, we will look back at the whole day. What did we learn? What can we use in our day-to-day business?
Learning Objectives
The simulation will be tailored to meet your specific needs and learning goals. However, the following are the primary objectives in general:
- How to apply DevOps principles in a real life situation?
- How to find the right balance between delivering your SLA requirements and your IT projects according to plan?
- How to experience how DevOps can bring serious value 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 act in a DevOps environment?
- How to show business their responsibilities in making IT Projects more successful?
Target Audience
This simulation is targeted at all roles and employees in Business, IT Development and IT Operations who want to apply Lean, Agile and ITSM principles to improve the performance of their IT Services or to create more value out of their IT Solutions.
This simulation is for organizations who want to develop their culture to achieve better collaboration and as a result, faster and error-free deployment of new IT Solutions. The simulation can be used for:
- Awareness programs
- Assessment sessions
- Teambuilding
Unless otherwise specified, all courses include official examination
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