Apollo13 at Kasperksky Lab Moscow, Russia

Case Study: Teamwork and Leadership as Essential Capabilities for ITSM Implementation

Client

«Kaspersky Lab» is a global company which main focus is to develop, distribute and support leading virus protection, anti-spam and anti-hacker software solutions. The company has established itself among the top four international vendors of information security software products.

«Kaspersky Lab» is an international group with headquarters in Moscow and five regional branches responsible for control and coordination of local offices and partners. Partner network consists of more than 700 «level one» partners in more than 100 countries.

«Kaspersky Lab» provides broad range of software solutions for secure protection from information threats. The company produces software for home users (Kaspersky CRYSTAL, Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2011, Kaspersky Internet Security 2011, Kaspersky Mobile Security 9) as well as for enterprises (Kaspersky Open Space Security family of products). Over 300 million people worldwide are protected by Kaspersky Lab products and technologies.

Being a high-technology company, «Kaspersky Lab» has internal IT-department responsible for fulfillment of business demands for information technology.

Objective

Starting from 2009 the IT-department has undertaken several steps toward implementation of IT service management (ITSM) processes. Taking into account the fact that key success factor of ITSM initiatives is to change personal attitude of managers and specialists, the CIO decided to organize special training event for IT staff.

The training objectives were defined as follows:

• To help employees to better understand ITSM processes and their interactions
• To make managers and key specialists able to develop, analyze and improve management processes based on measurable targets
• To gain more teamwork experience
• To improve personal leadership skills of specific managers

Since «Kaspersky Lab» is a global company and the trainings expected to involve more than 50 employees from several countries it was decided to deliver trainings in English.

Solution

Having the customer’s objective Cleverics offered a simulation game, based on «Apollo 13 — an ITSM case experience» licensed from GamingWorks (The Netherlands).

After several meetings with Cleverics’ consultants and customer’s IT managers it was decided to arrange simulation games for four teams in parallel, thereby establishing a competitive situation between the teams. Than all training participants were assigned their roles and an approach to game supervision was agreed. The consultants also proposed to customize the game introducing a new role — mission coordinator, who was responsible for overall mission success (all four games) and had authority to distribute resources and even people between the teams. A set of adapted KPIs with their target values and measurement system were established to provide real-time monitoring of mission progress and people performance (including personal ratings for the mission coordinator and all team leaders).

Results

On the 14th of July 2010 four parallel simulation games «Apollo 13 — an ITSM case experience» were delivered in a coordinated manner by Cleverics (which employs the largest number of certified trainers in Russia, CIS and Eastern Europe). Such training happened for the first time in Russia and CIS and was really unique event. According to the customer requirements three of four games were delivered in English again the first time in Russia.

During the training day four teams were introduced into a game situation, far beyond their everyday IT experience, to concentrate on managing and organization of their work processes. Each team had to achieve the main goal — to save astronauts whose health level depended on in-time incident resolution, proper change implementation, effective resource control etc. The participants faced lack of resources and capabilities to effectively manage the game situation. It was the very first round which revealed that it was absolutely necessary to clearly define roles and responsibilities, to set up communications and to establish manageable processes to be able to succeed. Each team got dedicated time before the second and later game rounds to analyze the performance, to define what to improve, to agree how to achieve that. The mission progress was measured and communicated to all teams in form of a balanced scorecard at the end of each round.

After completion of the game session a brief review was produced which contained essential findings about both key participants (personal observations) and teamwork (group observations). The review was discussed with the CIO. As the result of the training the customer not only attained the initial objective but also received valuable information to take into account when considering further personnel development plans.

Solution provider

Cleverics is a company that helps to implement and use Information technology with a high effect and proper risk control. And with pleasure. Cleverics delivers professional services in information technology management area — implementation and optimization of IT-processes, audit and assessment of IT management, ITSM processes automation, trainings for managers and specialists.