A short while ago my team and myself ran a pilot of a DevOps simulation with our friends from G2G3. The idea of learning from a simulation (not unlike business simulations that I used to play as PC games – does anyone remember “oil imperium”?) appealed to me and I set this up for my team.

Let me be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Boy was I in for a treat. Although we had a room full of people who know DevOps principles and practices we learned a lot from this one day. Let me quickly explain how the simulation runs to give you an idea.

The simulation runs in three rounds and in each round you try to make money for the company. The attendees are split into traditional roles like developer, tester, operations, service desk, product owner, scrum master etc. You get precious little guidance and off you go building features and serving customer needs. Not surprisingly you initially struggle. After the first round you talk about what to improve and have another go. And then you do the same for the third round. The real power comes from the activities being non-technical which means everyone can contribute – think of Tetris-style puzzles you have to solve to implement a feature for example. And without worrying too much about specific DevOps practices the team “discovers” better ways of working that are aligned with DevOps principles – collaboration, visual management of work, looking for patterns.

Most of the other DevOps trainings I have been part of have been pretty technical, which is great for the techies among us. But what about the project managers, the defect coordinators, the change management people, the PMO – they either have to sit through some “foreign” material in a DevOps course or often don’t even attend DevOps training. How can we then change the culture of the organisation and be inclusive of everyone. I think this simulation will get us a step closer to everyone understanding what DevOps and Agile is about and that there is a lot that can be done in addition to automation and tech practices.

I believe this simulation can be super powerful if you get your project team or leadership to attend. In a safe environment people can take on roles they don’t usually play and hence emphasize with those roles better after the simulation. The whole team will work on improvements together and it is easy to see how the learnings will bleed into their day-to-day delivery experience. If you leave the training without thinking on how you can use Kanban boards better and how to improve the quality of communication that is associated with your service management tickets I will be very surprised.

The things you experience are the power of simple things like visual management and how to improve processes by looking end-to-end. Everyone in the simulation gets the chance to redesign delivery processes and tools like the ticket system and the Kanban boards. Nothing beats experiential learning and this is the best thing I have seen for DevOps and Agile ideas. We all left the room exhausted from the full-on day, but we also agreed that even though we all knew DevOps and Agile well, we learned a lot from it in regards to practical application. Just imagine how powerful this is with a group of people who have less previous knowledge. I cannot wait to run this again!!! And I cannot wait to run a simulation with our most experienced Delivery people to see how it changes their perspective.

After running the pilot I got a group together to become trainers for this simulation as I have so many ideas on how we can use this to improve organisations and delivery. Of course I want to run this internally as frequently as possible, but I also want to make this available for our clients. If you are intrigued, reach out to me and we can see how we can get something going for you.

• 

• 

• 

• 

•