Apollo 13 event report
Apollo 13, an ITSM case experience at itSMF Belgium.
On a sunny afternoon in June, 15 enthusiastic itSMF Belgium members came together at the nice offices of Quint Belgium to play a Service Management simulation game. 
Play? What most of them didn’t expect became clear from the ‘off’. This simulation, based on real historic facts, wasn’t to be taken lightly, it was a game, but ‘play’ was quickly forgotten as ‘The Mission’ became a matter of ‘life and death’.
Paul Wilkinson from GamingWorks, one of the inventors of Apollo 13 , introduced the simulation. Participants were provided with a bundle of information which contained role descriptions and clear mission goals.
The idea of the mission was to land on the moon and get back. Simple?
Of course, this premier requirement was to be achieved without having any crew members ‘lost’ during the mission (metric: Crew Safety %). Secondary requirements were to the take pictures of potential landing sites for future missions and to do all this within budget. The participants had to take into consideration that “on time and right first time” are pretty very important notions in manned space flight: it is rather difficult to put a rocket in reverse to give it another go!
The 15 intrepid participants received a reasonable amount of time to prepare for their mission. They used this time to set up their processes, involving all the different roles except for one, “the mission director”, also known as “the customer”. This was fulfilled by the game leader.
 Although they knew crew safety is important and that on every mishap from mission control this crew safety was reduced they forgot to ask what the critical level was for this crew safety.
Within 2 minutes of the first period in the simulation it turned out that, despite working hard to prepare them, no one seemed adequately prepared to tackle the different incidents they received from the astronauts. After THE major incident, where the decision is taken to abort the mission, the participants even forgot to review the mission requirements. Although working in a “recovery mode” they still had the opportunity to take pictures of the moon and satisfy at least this ‘business request’.
Although all participants were very skilled and experienced people in the service management domain, they didn’t do a great job as Mission Control. And they are not to blame. The Apollo 13 simulation is designed to provide a safe environment, where everything seems to goes wrong, and you need to handle this experiencing the stresses of users, customers, management, procedures, technology, … Sounds familiar?
The most important messages came (as always), during and after dinner. What are our key learning points?
Here are the learning points the participants came up with:
- The focus should always be on the goals you want to achieve
- As these should come from the business, communicate with them
- Process managers (owners) need to have sufficient authority
- Ensure that you have the ability to measure, monitor, review, report and communicate.
- Communication! Communication! Communication!
- A Big Bang will not work with a large change. The risk of losing control on the people and technology side is to high. Coaching in usage of roles, responsibilities, technology within the process is critical. (communication!)
- Not to say, “it is P1 so solve it within X minutes”, but to say “it is P1 because… “ include impact and urgency assessment in communication to solving groups (communication!).
- Responsibility: higher management should take responsibility for the ultimate delivery of services.
- Big Picture: Importance of ensuring people have an overview of what’s required and why (communication!)
- Keep it simple
- Never try a to implement maturity level 5 processes in an organization with a maturity level of 1
- And last but so very important learning point: Process and tools should be tailored towards customer and user needs!
Conclusions: During the preparation time (30 minutes) all the time went to setting up the processes. Afterwards the participants agreed that the focus there should have been on the people and the jobs they had to perform. Processes are in function of this. During the mission they worked in the opposite way and put the process upfront. Processes, roles, responsibilities and tools are indeed things that could help to offer an excellent service… as long that we never forget to adopt and adept them to our company and staffs attitude, behavior and culture.
Also a simulation is not only a game but has a real value. The participants confirmed that they really had learned something and will not forget it the next day because of the simulated experience.
The mission didn’t go that well, but after the recap and a good Belgian pint of beer all participants went home with a feeling they had learned from this simulated experience.
Your mission observer.
Steven De Smet
President itSMF Belgium
PS: I forgot to mention that communication and communication is somewhat important too!
 
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