Active Learning Works from the Eyes of a Phoenix Project Facilitator

Digital business models demand different performance metrics and consumers reward those companies able to deliver them. Organizations who can’t meet the demands will likely fail.

A key way to improve upon past performance and shift into a new way of working mandates enhanced skills and knowledge development for IT professionals and teams.

DevOps aims for a simple, yet vital goal to make IT, faster, easier and cheaper, and to provide more value to the business/consumer/users. DevOps, a philosophy that arose from an urgent need for better alignment, collaboration, and empathy between IT Development and IT Operations teams or departments, is now increasingly used to denote precisely the aforementioned essential ingredients that constitute the New IT wave. For us, enterprise-wide DevOps stands for rethinking traditional IT practices and capabilities, including a product, process, and people perspective. DevOps is the ultimate search for flow in the delivery of IT services. Many firms are in dire need to find this flow before it is too late. We denote this as “DevOps or die.” In discussions with CEOs, this often helps to open their eyes.

The Knowledge and skill sets can be learned, consulted, and make use of the tool. It is the most important and useful for an organization is to realized and keep it as a habit by people who are involved.

Gamification is in the eye of market leaders many organizations started to adapt because it solves the mystery and improvements occur without needs for guidance.

The Phoenix Project Simulation is one of the most popular gamification taken place worldwide. As a facilitator for the Phoenix Project in Japan, I would like to share my experience and feedback from actual participants of the game.

Let me summarize this into three points.

1. The Phoenix Project provides the essential elements needed to improve an organization
2. The first run can boost the self-improvement initiatives by themselves and also acts as a baseline for the second run and so on
3. The Phoenix Project covers all the Skills and Knowledge areas stated by DASA Team Competence Model

1. The Phoenix Project is a simulation; therefore, driven by the participants, not the facilitator. It results in finding necessary and specific strengths and improvement area which suits the organization, and it won’t be general nor unusable results. The facilitator ensures the participants do not go off track and that they identify other opportunities.
2. The conclusion will be pointing out the actions that participants will take in their day to day priorities. The participants of the Simulation will have an opportunity to share their experiences and learning in front of the class and share what they will change when they go back to their companies. The benefit is that through the simulation they were able to realize the value of active learning themselves; therefore, the facilitator reveals a part of the big iceberg they will need to break down, through teamwork and self-reflection they can determine the rest to avoid a crash.
3. DASA Team Competence Model is always referred to by the facilitator during the class discussions since improvement points fall under one or more of them. Doing this demonstrates how powerful and how impactful knowledge and skill development is for IT professionals and teams DASA to address market demands improve organizational and business value.

Hence, every single professionals and organization that participated in the simulations that I delivered were extremely positive about the Phoenix Project and highly recommended it to their colleagues and other teams within their companies. The feedback shared was comprised of how around the fact that simulating real-world experiences helped them to realize the need to improve on the way they interacted with each other and also demonstrated the power of active learning versus traditional passive -class and it helped to practice whats heard and learned from books. Many said that it helps to initiate improvement actions in both personal and organizational perspectives.