“Finding smart solutions for complex problems, constantly challenging, and always moving forward with the people I work with are the things that make me love what I do.”
Utrecht, June 22th 2017 – Dutch ServiceNow service provider Plat4mation has ported the DevOps business simulation game ‘Phoenix Project’ to ServiceNow. Originally developed by the Dutch business simulation developer GamingWorks, the game enables employees and teams to quickly grasp the fundamentals of DevOps. The game is inspired on the book ‘The Phoenix Project’ by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford. This novel is widely regarded as essential reading for those who want to understand and successfully deploy DevOps. Conceived as a card game by GamingWorks, Plat4mation has now ported the Phoenix Project to ServiceNow. As a Service Management tool, ServiceNow is ideally suited to facilitate DevOps implementation and a DevOps way of working.
Organizations that could benefit from DevOps, are typically confronted with rapidly changing business and/or user requirements. As a consequence, they seek to be more flexible and agile in meeting these demands and adopt a DevOps approach to product or service development. Tooling such as ServiceNow is ideally suited for such an approach as it provides functionality to manage both “Planned” (i.e. Themes, Epics, Stories) and “Unplanned” (i.e. Incidents and Alerts) work. ServiceNow positions itself as the “Single System of Action” to provide DevOps engineers a single platform that holds all activities relevant to them, including the right prioritization.
Elmer de Valk, managing partner at Plat4mation explains: “Adapting to DevOps can be hard and in any case will be a transformative project. To ensure that affected employees understand the implications and benefits, I believe the quickest and most effective way to adapt to a DevOps way of working and mindset is through experience. We therefore utilize The Phoenix Project game and ported it to ServiceNow to enable organizations to gain a better understanding of the challenges and rewards of a DevOps implementation. It will also make clear how ServiceNow supports a DevOps way of working. We believe this simulation will be instrumental in teaching teams how to adopt DevOps principles.”
The Phoenix Project as used by Plat4mation consists of two rounds. During the first round, DevOps principles need to be used and applied during a business simulation. Multi disciplinary teams with representation from Business, Development and Operations need to successfully complete ‘the round’ by working on Business and IT-projects and issues. During this round, teams will be confronted with new demands from the business, new ideas and (external) developments that will influence development and project schedules. Communication is key during this round and typically a lack of formal communication mechanisms will lead to lower than expected results. During the second round, communication will be structured using ServiceNow. Participants will be able to experience how ServiceNow can help streamline team communications and support a DevOps way of working. Performance improvements due to a more mature level of operations can be made visible through this game.
Jan Schilt, owner and director of GamingWorks: “Our partnership with Plat4mation is unique. We’ve managed to bring their in depth knowledge of ServiceNow and our expertise in interactive learning together in one simulation. This simulation will help organizations to quickly gain an understanding of what ServiceNow is, which features it offers and how these can be used to add value to the organization as a whole. DevOps isn’t merely automation of processes or activities, it’s also about changing behaviour and company culture. Simulations are ideally suited to create awareness of behavioural and cultural patterns within organizations. In addition, simulations are helpful in gaining new knowledge and enhance the understanding of a subject in a way that is unattainable through training alone.”
Plat4mation and ServiceNow will launch their version of the Phoenix Project game during a joint event this September.
Based in The Netherlands and Belgium, Plat4mation supports clients all over the world to unleash the potential of ServiceNow. We strive to bring the best implementation and development capabilities in all areas of your organization, respond to client demands and realize results quickly. We provide a combination of functional and technical expertise, motivation and flexibility to ensure that our consultants turn dreams into reality, efficiently, affordably and with a high customer satisfaction.
We are a ServiceNow Sales, Services, Technology and Training Partner
We assist organizations by providing a complete set of services from strategic advice, implementation of platforms to the development of platform applications.
Save
Sign up to our monthly Flow@Work Exclusive newsletter to get free access to our expertise and lots of tips and tricks to make work flow on the Now® Platform.
