GAME CHANGER
ABOUT THE GAME A
s an educational tool, the war game shows how to use business architecture by enabling people to actually experience it. Customization and personalized game play were key to designing the game. Giving play-
ers the freedom to make their own decisions motivates them to proceed and persist because the game was progressing according to their choices. My colleague Radhika Patel, a systems engineer at ARDEC, and I spent six months creating the game scenario and all of its components.
COMPETING TEAMS Te game began with two competing teams, the Tiger Team and Skunk Works. (See Figure 1.) Each team comprised six or seven ARDEC government employees, mixed in age and experience, who assumed the role of midlevel managers.
FIGURE 1
TEAM 1: SKUNK WORKS
TEAM 2: TIGER TEAM
TEAMS • Create an offering for the Market Team.
• Execute strategies. • Make adjustments based on reactions of market.
CONTROL TEAM
CONTROL TEAM • Structure and run the game. • Introduce external shocks. • Track models and variables. • Play all other participants.
MARKET TEAM PROJECT MANAGER
MARKET TEAM • React to strategies of the different competitors.
• Drive the market dynamic. • Judge attractiveness of offerings.
THE PLAYERS
The game pitted two teams (Skunk Works and Tiger Team) against each other. The Market Team was a third team that role-played as an ARDEC customer: a project management team. The Control Team was made up of the author and Patel, who ran the game and influenced team actions with outside forces. (Graphics courtesy of the author)
Each team received an email from its respective director, played by the Control Team, that included their competency plan and explained some of the strategic goals they were trying to achieve. Teir objective was to develop a budget proposal to be reviewed by the Project Management Team. Te director was convinced that the project management office could use their services to help perform threat analysis on potential new projects. (See Figure 2.) Based on this insight, he assembled the Skunk Works team and the Tiger Team to devise strategies to tackle the problem.
Team members got colored tokens to use with the capability map. Each token represented an enabler of a given capability. In our game, capabilities are enabled by four key aspects, includ- ing people, process, tools and information. Tese enablers define how well ARDEC performs a capability.
Players used a maturity rating table that outlined the four enablers and how to measure their ability on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest maturity. Every project manager needs to know the level of ability the organization has to perform a job. (In fact, the tool provides that information to anyone—office chief, director, president or anybody else in the organization.)
For example, if I lack trained and experienced people, the people enabler for the capability in the game will be red. I might have a procedure to follow that is working well, so my process enabler is marked green. Tat signals to me that I have an issue with my people, but not my process.
Similarly, one of the capabilities in the game had the people enabler marked as red. Determining that they needed to invest in the people enabler of that capability, the teams selected as many green people tokens as they felt necessary. It was important for teams to see that they not only had to pick which capabil- ity, but also that there could be different reasons for investment. Do you need to invest in your people? Do you need to develop a process? Tose different enablers all have different costs asso- ciated with them and require a strategic discussion to determine what’s needed to get the job done.
To make the data more visible, we developed a tool using the measurement criteria from the maturity rating table to automate
16
Army AL&T Magazine
October-December 2018
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