Gamification: Apollo 13

What is more fun than learning by playing. Forget daily habits and experience how the Apollo 13 – simulation game will provide new organisational insights, whilst proving that ITIL as ITSM practice driver really adds value.

We will take you on a journey, starting with those famous words “Houston, we have a problem” of the Apollo 13 mission. Although the mission was a failure, not being able to land on the moon, this event is considered one of their finest moments. All odds where against Mission Control Center. The structural damage sustained during flight, should have been the end for the 3 astronouts. Not enough air, not enough energy, not enough time.

But the way everyone commited in the Apollo space program made the impossible possible. Thinking far outside of the box. Being inventive with scare resources. Pushing creativity and teamwork to the limit to come up with viable alternatives.

Everyone involved took part in the greatest space rescue mission ever.

We will use this context to trigger your creativity and capability to succeed during the simulation game.

The ‘Apollo 13 – an ITSM case experience™’ simulation game is an intense, one-day training in which ITIL 2011 concepts and processes are experienced through the use of this interactive game.

In this training, real life situations from 4 phases of the Apollo 13 mission are simulated. The build & launch, earth orbit and lunar approach, transearth coast, re-entry & splashdown. You will work in a team, playing the roles of the Mission Control Center in Houston. Your mission: bring the crippled spacecraft and its crew safely home.

By doing so, you and your colleagues will learn and experience all the benefits of ITIL best practice solutions. You will work in a team consisting of 8 to 13 Mission Control Center members. Within the simulation the team must translate the NASA strategy into service designs for ‘Building & Launching’ and for ‘Maintaining and Supporting’ the mission. The team must transition the Apollo 13 launch vehicle and supporting facilities into live Service operation. During the live mission operation the team will be confronted with events, incidents and requests from the crew. In each round, the team undergoes the following steps: designing or improving their processes, running the simulation, reflecting, and reporting.

Throughout the game various ITIL processes are necessary to enable ground staff, the crew and the Mission Director to prioritize decisions and choices in order to resolve problems and make timely changes to the spacecraft configuration and its trajectory. Within each round of the game, the team will apply ‘Continual Service Improvement’ practices aimed at evaluating and improving the quality of their services and ensuring a continual alignment with changing NASA demands.

At the end of the simulation participants will reflect on their learning experiences, identifying what went well and what went wrong throughout the lifecycle of the mission. They will analyze and discuss whether their IT Service management capabilities were a strategic asset enabling NASA to achieve its business goals. They will be able to relate what they have seen, felt, experienced and learnt to their own working environment and identify Service improvement opportunities in their own organization. Teams will receive the NASA service strategy document and

a Balanced Scorecard (BSC) representing the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to be achieved (see below). At the end of each phase, teams will report on their performance in relation to the service levels. The teams must demonstrate they can manage costs and risks and at the same time deliver performance and business value. Prior to each phase, elements of the ITIL theory can be explained in relation to the processes that will be encountered in the coming round. The actual Apollo 13 mission will be reviewed and related to the ITIL processes at the end of each phase, showing how mission success was accomplished in the end by using these processes. Although the game has been designed to learn ITIL concepts Apollo 13 can equally be applied in any organization wanting to experience the benefits of process based ways of working and team working.

This course provides IT and Service Management practitioners a pragmatic insight in how Service Level Management is more than the presentation of results of agreed activities between provider and customer.