Gamification: Grab a Pizza

Did you ever wanted to know how other companies organise themselves to become efficient and effective? What their challenges were? How they coped with change?
What if you could experience those dynamics firsthand? What is more fun than learning by playing. Take up a role in the fictive Grab@Pizza organisation and submerge yourself in a company who’s growing and successfull. Where choices need
to be made in line with business needs and with the available resources. We provide you with the setting and during the different game stages, you will be facing new challenges. Working together, formal and informal communications, business requirements, IT capabilities, funding.. will all be put in the mix to allow you to experience the flow of the organisation. It is safe, it is fun, but most of all it is a game which opens doors, allowing you to learn and develop takeaways which
matter to you.
We will take you on a business journey, as part of the successfull pizza foodchain “Grab@Pizza”. The participants will play one or more of the following roles:

• Business Manager Sales
• Service Level Manager
• IT Manager
• IT Support Team
• IT Operations Team
• Change Manager
• IT Finance Manager
• Service Manager
• Business Manager Logistics

Every role involved has a contribution to the evolution of the organisation.
The Business Manager Sales has made a 6-month business plan containing 5 important business initiatives. The Service Level Manager will analyze the requirements and translate them to IT service requirements. IT must implement the IT solutions to ensure the business can achieve their objectives.
The Change Manager will plan the changes on the change calendar and will manage the change. The change requests will come from business demands, problem manager, supplier or IT operations.
IT Support will support the users. They will receive calls, requests or incidents in each round that need to be solved by Service Desk or Incident Management. Problem Management will analyze the incidents and define change requests
to avoid new incidents.

IT Operations will monitor the capacity and availability of the IT Infrastructure. To avoid any downtime or incidents they will create change requests to upgrade or improve the infrastructure.
The IT manager will lead his IT team.
IT Finance will manage the IT Budget.
This role will be responsible for the (agreed) performance of the IT Services.
The facilitator of the game is the CEO.
In your new role, you enter an international pizza organisation which is going fast.

Your task is to support the organisation based on the role you have. The market is highly competitive which forces your business to design new products, develop powerful marketing and sales initiatives and develop a high level of operating excellence with a fast, low cost, high quality order and delivery process. IT plays an important role in enabling the business to achieve its strategic aims.

Your challenge is to align yourself with demands and organize your organisation in such a way that the Business can achieve its targets for lowering operational costs, increasing revenue and market share, and increasing customer satisfaction and
loyalty.

To make it a learning experience, the game itself is build up out of 6 rounds.
Each round represents one month in the lifecycle of Grab@ Pizza. In each round depending on your role, you will need to:

• analyze the current performance of your IT Infrastructure and organization;
• identify the Business requirements and demands for IT solutions;
• make decisions about resources, workload and priorities;
• calculate the IT costs for this round and make investment decisions;
• plan Application Development activities and plan the Change Calendar;
• propose and implement improvements to align IT performance to business needs.
• At the end of each round the team will be confronted with the actual performance of the Business in terms of:
• business Sales figures;
• business Operating costs;
• customer satisfaction.

This Business Simulation will teach you, how to make the organisational dynamics flow so Grab@Pizza remains that high performing organisation their leading market position. This Business Simulation will teach the participants how to
become a High Performant department. The team(s) will be faced with the need to align their IT capabilities to changing business needs, reflecting the challenges facing many IT organizations.

• How to deliver agreed IT Services with limited resources.
• Limited in terms of budget and employees.
• How to minimize your IT costs by optimizing ITSM people, processes and supporting technology.
• How to use your Supplier effectively.
• How to prioritize IT investments and workload, in terms of Maintenance & Support and Innovation & Development.
• How to translate Business Requirements into the required IT Services.
• How to plan application development activities, prioritize the projects/ changes planned on the Change Calendar.
• How to minimize potential business risks threats to continuity caused by poor availability, capacity and security of the IT services.
• How to realize and demonstrate business value.

This Business Simulation will teach the group how to deploy the People, Process, Product and Partner capabilities to create a High Performing IT department.
This will be further enriched by focussing on the Jerry Luftman’s principles for effective Business and IT Alignment as part of the reflection moments between the rounds. Area’s covered are:

• Communication
• Competency and IT Value Measurement
• Governance
• Partnership
• Scope and Architecture
• Skills