Engaging and Enlightening: The Magic of the Polestar ITSM Simulation

A facilitated in-room event, the Polestar ITSM simulation is designed to demonstrate the benefits of applying Service Management best practices (e.g., ITSM, ITIL, Lean) to maximize performance within a simulated retail business (Polestar).

The Objectives

The objective of the Polestar business is to generate maximal revenue, profitability, and customer satisfaction by driving operational efficiencies via a blend of successful interventions. The business is underpinned by several key products and services that are highly dependent on IT to operate effectively. When IT is unavailable, or slow to respond, the business is impacted.

Participants play a variety of roles across Business, IT Service Desk, IT Operations, and IT Development teams. In the early stages, the organization is siloed, but participants quickly start to collaborate to align priorities and blend processes, tools, and systems with the goal of driving the business forward.

The simulation is delivered over several rounds, and typically, in the first round, participants will experience the following:

1. Sub-optimal business performance
2. Teams working hard but not set up for success or seeing positive results
3. Low customer satisfaction scores
4. A chaotic and highly reactive experience

Polestar ITSM has a proven track record as the world’s leading ITSM and ITIL simulation supporting many of the world’s largest and most complex enterprises globally.

The true value of experiential simulations lies in the connections between the experiences and actions of the participants and the corresponding experiences and actions evident in the real world. The simulation has been designed to provide an abstracted – but compelling – demonstration of the organizational, process, and product issues that exist at the enterprise level.

Fundamentally, the simulation is designed to win ‘Hearts and Minds’ and enable participants to experience a multi-year ITSM transformation in a single day. The simulation resonates with a variety of stakeholder profiles (from CIO to Service Desk Agent), and the messaging can be aligned to relate to the customer’s own current challenges.

As part of an overall ITSM transformation program, the ITSM simulation can drive a significant increase in awareness, engagement, and adoption.

Polestar ITSM can be applied to a variety of use cases, including:

• Leadership strategy alignment events
• As part of an overarching ITSM transformation program
• Targeted improvements across all IT support teams
• Team building events (particularly cross-function)

Throughout the event, powerful parallels are drawn to the current challenges, opportunities, and next steps that most organizations must take to propel their ITSM initiatives to the next level, providing a significant game-changing experience by increasing adoption and momentum in driving change. Polestar ITSM:

• Provides the opportunity for participants to solve ITSM-related challenges through repetition and reinforcement
• Allows for risk-free business decision-making, strategizing, and problem-solving
• In addition to ‘winning hearts and minds’, participants will draw on their own experience, and take home best practices, techniques, strategies, and ideas that will help to drive transformation back in their own workplace.

Polestar ITSM (originally developed by G2G3) is currently owned by Sunburst Simulations Limited (www.sunburst-simulations.com/) as part of their portfolio of leading business simulations. Over 250,000 people, at many of the world’s biggest corporations, have had breakthrough insights through their award-winning Polestar ITSM and DevOps simulations.

Sunburst licenses the simulation to delivery partners globally.

“As a Sunburst premier partner, we believe that Polestar ITSM continues to lead the world with a proven global track record at supporting transformation across some largest and most complex enterprises. In our opinion, no other event (virtual or otherwise) comes close to delivering the value offered by Sunburst’s Polestar ITSM Simulation as an immersive experience”.

– Stuart Laing, Head of Delivery, Simplayfi