At Qafzah, we are passionate about upskilling the workforce of the Arab world in the domain of digital transformation. We always look for innovative ways to provide knowledge transfer that go beyond traditional classroom settings. That's why we reached out to GamingWorks to collaborate in offering business simulation workshops that help professionals learn more about new ways of working including DevOps. 

This Phoenix Project online business simulation workshop took place on December 2, 2021 with a group of professionals from different organizations and countries in the Middle East. 

In this article, Paul Wilkinson, the well-known author and IT expert, provides insights about the session and the takeaways that participants came up with after attending this workshop.

Sitting in a stormy, grey, wet Holland, with hail stones lashing at the window, conducting a DevOps workshop with a team comprised of people sitting in various locations in the Middle East - a strange by product of COVID. 

The drawback of COVID is having to conduct simulation workshops online, with players at different remote locations with all the challenges of technology working (‘WiFi is slow’…’Can’t get the camera and microphone to work’, ‘…continually forgetting to unmute’, ‘….people not switching the camera on’, ‘…not seeing that people are suddenly disengaged because of external interruptions (Delivery man)’. The benefit of it all is that it has made the World a much smaller place, giving us the ability to work remotely with people in different locations and time zones – with a new discipline for communicating and collaborating.
It isn’t ideal.
It isn’t the way we would prefer. 

However, globally we may be in various stages of going into or coming out of lockdown, but learning still has to go on, so too does improvingour ways of working and sometimes also transforming to new ways of working, and having to do it remotely! We must develop these remote skills. 

QAFZAH organized this remote Phoenix Project simulation workshop to explore and experiment with DevOps, and to give delegates a chance to learn and to capture improvement actions they could take-away.

We asked the team what they wanted to explore:

• What is DevOps and what will it mean to the way we work? 
• Why should we do DevOps – what benefits will it bring? 
• How can a simulation add value to a learning experience?

The team took part in the Phoenix Project DevOps business simulation game (Online version).
The simulation is a form of ‘experiential learning’ or ‘learning-by-doing’. The team play business and IT roles in the fictional ‘Parts Unlimited’ organization. They are challenged with a growing backlog of business demands for new ‘products’ and ‘Features’, and a need to transform to agile/Devops ways of working to remain competitive. 

The CEO challenges the team ‘I don’t know what all this DevOps stuff is, but if it is enabling our competitors to beat us then I want it. Now’!

The simulation is played in a number of game rounds. In each round the team gets to:

• Design and agree ‘how they will work together’ to enable a faster flow of work
• Experiment and explore applying the agreed way of working in the simulation
• Perform a retrospective: what went well, what needs improving – applying continual learning and improvement behaviors.

The team is challenged not only to apply DevOps concepts (e.g. the 3 ways of DevOps; CALMS; Value Stream Management; Conducting a ‘stand-up’), but also to apply effective ‘communication and collaboration’ in a remote setting.
At the end of each round the team must demonstrate an improvement in typical DevOps metrics (e.g. Increased number of releases, faster releases, fewer failures & rework from releases, mean time to restore services), but also BizDevOps metrics. In other words, the Value and Outcomes achieved (e.g. Increased revenue, reduced business costs, share price, Customer satisfaction). 

It is a journey of discovery. How well do the teams:

• listen to each other and apply ‘active listening’;
• engage the whole team in feedback and improving; 
• apply DevOps principles and stick to the new ways of working;
• help and coach each other to ensure that they can embed the new ways of working into their team behaviors. 

At the end of the simulation the team looks back on the whole experience.
‘What did we apply today in this simulation that we need to take away and apply in OUR organizations?’

These were the captured takeaways at the end of the day:

• Look at current business performance and goals, and show how DevOps can
  add value (increase time to value, increase outcomes, reduce waste, costs, risks)
  - DevOps is NOT the goal!
• Foster a culture of safe (no blame) experimentation aimed at
  increasing flow, removing waste.
• Identify barriers, constraints and waste in our team, visualize this and make a
  business case for prioritizing improvement. Try and reserve time for
  continual learning and improving.
• End-to-end alignment of goals. Identify SILOed goals and goal conflicts,
  agree shared goals, visualize for all teams the work that contribute to goals,
  identify blockers and barriers that are prevent goal achievement (on time/value realized).
• Look at how we prioritize our backlogs to include (value adding work, technical debt, improvement work, defects, risk related work) – gain customer feedback to help prioritize.
• Foster a culture of ‘communication and collaboration’. Behaviors that supported this:

1. Align our teamwork to business goals (visualize on team board/tools) so that work can be prioritized effectively (and quickly)
2. Share our team goals with other teams (upstream and downstream), identify conflicts.
3. Share our pains/improvement needs as team (prioritize these) – identify pains that need multiple teams to address to improve end-to-end flow.
4. Giving feedback to others when we see mistakes (not as blame, as an exploration of how we can stop it happening again)
5. No blame culture: make it safe to (experiment) fail (learn & improve from failure) – start with non critical safe to fail work, to build skills and practice new ways of working.
6. Foster an open culture to share ideas, give suggestions. If people don’t then explicitly look for feedback (engage and empower all to give input and suggest improvements)
7. Offer help (dare to ask for help). 

‘Management teams need to go through this’! was one comment.

‘There is more to DevOps than I had thought, it is a lot about culture and collaborating’

The above were takeaways from a 4-hour experiential learning workshop with delegates from different organizations in different countries. Imagine what you could achieve by bringing the end-to-end stakeholders, decision makers and teams together in your organization? 

Which of the above takeaways would your organization benefits from?