CarGO – IT Service Management essentials

CarGO – IT Service Management essentials

Do you recognize this?

IT Service Management is being used in most organizations to organize IT Operations and to streamline Information Technology activities into customer facing services.

Originally, the IT Infrastructure Library provided the core guidance by means of a Best Practice for organizations to fulfill this purpose. However, with very few exceptions, only a few processes are adopted and these are mainly in customer interfacing IT support and less on the more tactical and strategic levels.

About the game

CarGO is focusing on the essentials in IT Service Management and designed for professionals who wish to be quickly recognized for having the competences needed to implement and improve effective specific IT Service Management processes – without delving into the details of frameworks.

With the essentials of IT Service Management in place, organizations can achieve;

  • enhancing an organization’s provision of IT services.
  • application of effective specific IT Service Management processes in multi-vendor environments – where services are managed in cooperation.
  • the steps towards implementing a set of IT Service Management processes.
  • successful management of specific IT Service Management processes.
  • implementation of the foundations of IT Service Management processes which can be audited by ISO/IEC 20000

About the “CarGo” simulation game

CarGO is a company that is specialized in the transport of cars all over the world. They plan the transport of cars of their customer on ships owned by contractors. These ships travel according to a strict schedule from harbor to harbor. CarGO has 3 types of customers:  private customers, car dealers and car factories.

CarGO has a current sales of $ 100,000 per round and the customer satisfaction is 5 on a scale of 10. They face some serious issues with the IT Systems and they must be solve in the next 4 rounds of this simulation:

  1. Too many unsolved incidents
  2. Too much workload on our IT Support desk
  3. Solving time is too long
  4. Too slow implementing new services

As a result, CarGO is missing sales opportunities and customers are unhappy about the services.

In this simulation the team of participants will act as teams within the CarGO organization. Business, IT and IT Vendors will work together in making the organization more successful. Step by step the team will apply the basic IT Service Management processes and will learn how to deal with different business and IT challenges.

Round 1 – Getting to know CarGO

In round 1, the team will experience the first challenges within the CarGO organization. They will experience the current way of working, learn the business dynamics and the processes within the IT department. Also, they learn how to collaborate with the vendors that deliver part of the services.

At the end of the first round, the team will perform a Maturity Check to identify the current level of maturity and explore the service improvement opportunities.

Round 2 – Improving operational processes

In this second round, we are going to focus on the operational processes. We discuss improvement opportunities to improve helpdesk, incident management and problem management. We also work on reducing the workload and optimizing the flow of work using service automation solutions. At the end of this round, we will execute a Maturity Check again to see if we made progress and if we can define new improvement opportunities.

Round 3 – Focus on tactical and strategic processes

Now it’s time to move our processes to a more tactical level. We will implement service design processes in order to design and implement some new tactical processes. For this we will perform availability, capacity and security management activities. We also optimize the vendor agreements with our two vendors. It was also time to implement the right security measures to avoid future outages. After the final service improvement cycle, we are ready for our last round.

Round 4 – Experiencing a high performing team

After making some final adjustments, we can now experience how all the improvements and our new way of working developed this high performing team. Processes will be more efficient, monitoring and reporting more accurately and we have solved our main IT service management problems.

Outcome and Goals

In this simulations participants will learn and experience

  • The essence of IT Service Management
  • How to apply the basic IT Service Management processes and can learn how they can bring value to all stakeholders.
  • How to bring the service organization to a more tactical- and strategic level in a short time.
  • How to optimize your workflows by implementing service improvements and service automation.
  • How to improve collaboration between different teams, vendors and other stakeholders to optimize the service quality.
  • Self evaluating own processes by regular quality checks helps improving processes.

After this simulation the participants also have a better focus on how their efforts can lead to an increase in business value.

Target Audience

This simulation is for operational IT Service Management employees. They will focus on the basic terminology of IT Service Management. It will help them to quickly apply the theory in their day-to-day work.

Team leads and process managers can learn how to facilitate the process of implementing and improving these new IT Service Management principles.

This simulation can also be used after an ITIL or FitSM foundation, as a kick-off session for an IT Service Management or FitSM program or for an assessment to improve the current maturity of your

Details about this simulation

Duration of the simulation: 1 day
Number of participants: 8 – 12
Basic expertise: No basic understanding required.
Interested in CarGO – IT Service Management essentials?