HumanIT – the people factor!
GamingWorks and Simagine, two competitors in the serious games industry joined forces and combined the best of two games to create a new business game. The game is called HumanIT and focuses on the people side of ITSM improvement programs. The game makes use of the Simagine game ‘A Heart Effort’, which is a question based game, aimed at creating dialogue and insight by exploring subjects from a variety of perspectives, and the ABC of ICT game from Gamingworks, which is an awareness and assessment instrument focusing on globally recognized worst practices in IT.
The questions in the game focus around People, Process, Product and performance and are based around the top chosen ABC worst practices captured globally.
At a Train the Trainer session for the new game a group of ITSM experts and practitioners involved in IT organizational change initiatives played a short version of the game. The team used the ‘people’ set of questions to explore behavior. Looking at Resistance, management involvement and commitment, tasks, roles, responsibilities and accountabilities. The team made the following discoveries in just 20 minutes. Exploring facts, feelings, and innovative solutions.
Critical Success Factors identified during the question rounds:
- Making the Tasks, Roles, Responsibilities and authority visible on the wall as posters, reminders. These will create discussion, raise awareness and clarify.
- The IT organization as an ‘open’ village. Creating together a desired culture. ‘Open’, ‘informal’, ‘giving feedback’. The organization needs to define together the type of culture they want to create. Hard agreements? processes, structure, procedures?…glued together by a shared culture and a defined set of ‘desired behavior’.
- Managers ‘walking-the-talk’, and ‘leading by example’ – this behavior must be seen as believable, create trust, be done with integrity to create by in and belief.
- Managers often think they demonstrate commitment, however this is often seen differently by process managers and line managers and employees, What behavior demonstrates ‘management commitment’ needs to be defined and agreed together.
Critical Fail Factors identified during the question rounds:
- Managers not walking the talk, or leading by example, particularly line managers.
- Mismatch and gap between directors, line managers and the process organization. The levels of responsibility, accountability and authority are often not clearly defined, understood or aligned to ensure success. Many assumptions are made and these are not owned or corrected.
- Too little honest and open feedback to each other, often feedback is negative and critical and not used positively to help improve.
- IT employees have poor self-reflective capabilities, they are quick to point and blame others and see this as reflective behavior.
The game captures improvement suggestions as input to a Continual Improvement Initiative. Involving, engaging and EMPOWERING people to give their feedback, input and suggestions to an improvement program, creating a shared view of the need and a shared buy-in to the improvement initiatives.
See Simagine news item on HumanIT, download the brochure.