DevOps Simulation – The Phoenix Project

What’s happening…? We all know the typical IT behaviors and complaints about developers throwing seemingly untested solutions over the wall into production and leaving Operations to pick up the pieces. On the other hand, we hear Development complaining about the barriers put up by Operations that delay deployment, or workload demands placed on developers from IT Operations, such as small updates, fixing issues and applications not working.

The increasing penetration of IT into all areas of the business and the desire for ever more and ever faster customer facing solutions is compounding the challenge even more. As a result, the workload for Development and IT Operations is growing, workflows are stuck and IT projects are failing, business executives are angry and frustrated, seeing lost business opportunities and risks to business operations.

Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford wrote an excellent novel “The Phoenix Project” about an organization facing these challenges and showed how to apply DevOps principles to achieve significant improvements and business value. This simulation is built around this groundbreaking book and lets you experience the dynamics of the book.

Learning Objectives

Parts Unlimited is in trouble. Newspaper reports reveal the poor financial performance of the organization. The only way to save the company and to make it competitive and profitable is “The Phoenix Project” which is an IT enabled business transformation, with Retail Operations as the business owner of this project.

The VP of IT Operations is asked to lead the IT Department and make sure “The Phoenix Project” is successful. However, he is facing a tremendous amount of work. Huge backlogs of issues, features and projects.

Your team will take different roles within Parts Unlimited. You can be Retail Operations, Human Resources or the CFO and run your projects. You can play the role of the VP of IT Operations or lead one of the IT functions. You will be suggesting improvements, addressing issues, developing applications, managing 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 four rounds you will work on the IT Projects and IT Issues and make sure “The Phoenix Project” is finished on time. But, beware, the business keeps coming up with new ideas and demands, and external developments outside your control can also throw a spanner in the works.

The Phoenix Project will provide candidates to understand the following:

• 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