The Phoenix Project DevOps business simulation

Who should attend the simulation workshop?

This simulation is targeted to all roles and people in business, IT development and IT operations who want to improve the performance of their IT services and create more value out of their IT solutions. Teams who want to develop a culture designed to achieve better collaboration, increased delivery velocity and quality.

This includes: CIOs, CTOs, IT management, IT development staff, IT operations staff, IT process owners, Business Managers and Business Process owners.

Use this simulation to:

• Learn and reinforce the impact of applying DevOps principles in all parts of the business
• Jumpstart your organizational transformation for DevOps

Introductory scene

Your company (Parts Unlimited) is in trouble. Newspaper reports reveal the poor financial performance of the organization. The only way forward to save the company and make it competitive and profitable is “The Phoenix Project”, 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 make sure “The Phoenix Project” will be a success. But he is facing a tremendous amount of work with huge backlogs of issues, features and projects.

Your team will act in different roles within the company Parts Unlimited: CEO, CISO, Retail Operations, IT Operations, Finance, CIO, Application Development or Human Resources.

Your challenge will be to use 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” will be finished on time. But beware, the business keeps coming with new ideas and demands, and external developments outside your control are just around the corner.

Round 1

Participants are assigned roles and receive beginning projects, features and issues to tackle. They will plan and do the work.

Round 2

The team will face a huge backlog of IT related issues such as: Incidents from the users of Sales, HR and Finance. There is a tremendous amount of work to do and everybody is busy, but there seems to be no clear insight into all the work-what it is, why it is needed and what will happen if it isn’t completed.

Round 3

The third round is more challenging. The CFO comes in with some serious SOX-404 compliancy issues that must be solved.
Besides this, there is still the backlog of features and issues from the previous round that required quick solutions.

Round 4

This 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.

After each round, participants will discuss what happened, what went well, and what needs improvement-exploring what this has to do with DevOps theory and how to improve work using DevOps principles. The teams will implement the learning outcomes in each subsequent round.

The final discussion includes lessons learned and what can be applied to your business.