Improve Application Management Skills at Heineken

Published on Sunday 15 April 2012

“It’s great to have this game at this moment. I am assigned to lead a large transition project and this game helped me. I was not happy in the first place to be the Flight Director, but after this game I was realy happy. It was a great preparation”

René Lijnse, Functional Consultant, Heineken Netherlands

 

Problem / Challenge

During this session the objective was to let IT people experience how to design products/services and transfer them to life operation in such a way that:

  • the service is well delivered
  • that the availability is according to the agreed SLA
  • there is no rework or extra support needed from 2nd/3rd line support

Other subjects were:

  • How to increase effective communication between design and support engineers
  • How to work as one team

Our Solution

GamingWorks designed a customized workshop using the Apollo 13 simulation.

  • Four de-centralized teams 

Four teams were created. They all worked in separate rooms

  • Round 1

In round 1 we had 2 teams. Team A (CapCom, IM, PM, ChangeManager) and Team B (the rest of the team). The Flight Director act as transition manager. Team B designed the rocket and Team A designed the Second round process plus a transition plan.
At the start of round 2, both teams needed to tranfer their solution to the other team. Flight Director was leading this process.

The rest of the game was the samen and we played the normal 3 simulated rounds.

Team Results

At the end of the day the four Flight Directors presented their basic learning points. Some of the key learning points were:

  • We recognized the need for creating shared processes and the need for following them.
  • We need to define communication and escalation processes
  • We need to spend more time in transfering products and services

After this session these learning point were captured in team development plans.