About the simulation
The mission of your team is clear: “Launch a rocket with MarsLander, bring it to Mars and collect valuable data for Universities and Research Centers”. Your challenge is to support the Mission Center, helping ensure they are able to achieve all mission goals. The Mission Director is managing the Mission Center and leads a team of consisting of Flight Operation, Navigation and Communication experts. These specialists manage the flight plan of the mission in accordance with mission goals and contractual agreements with the customers and suppliers.
The Mission Support Team consists of Support Engineers, Test Engineers and Change Management. They will fix all issues that occur during the mission. The Development Team develops and maintains applications, features and application fixes. Vendors are supporting the Mission Support Team with data communication services and data storage services. The Service Manager will manage the Service Design, Service Delivery and Service Improvement.
The Simulation
The simulation consists of 4 rounds. Each round will reflect a part of the mission.
Round 1 – Prepare the mission
The team will start with a traditional structure. There will be a Service Desk and first and second line support. The first actions are focused on getting a clear picture of the current Service requirements of Mission Control. There is also a backlog of issues from the test phase and the Development Team is working on the final application. The Service Manager will define the required services and the agreed KPI’s.
Round 2 – Launch and Hardy IV encounter
In this round, the flight plan will bring the space craft in an orbit around the Earth and on a flight path towards the tail of comet Hardy IV. The mission must collect valuable date from Hardy IV and send it back to Earth so that Universities and research centers can study this data. The Customer may raise new demands, issues will occur and the flight course may have to be changed. After this round, the team will explore opportunities to improve and design the next ‘release’ of the service.
Round 3 – Heading to Mars
The team has made changes in the way of working, made updates in their services and has responded to the changing demands from Mission Control. In this round, we introduce the concept of Service Teams. The team will experience how teams can increase flow, avoid rework and will create better and faster responses. The flight will reach Mars and the Spacecraft will have to make two orbits around Mars to collect new data. But how do we respond if the customer suddenly wants 4K movies from the landscape of Mars and a different format of graphical output of the data? Did we integrate the vendors in our teams? Did we implement some service automation solutions to increase our performance? Can the teams respond rapidly ‘end-toend’ to deploy a manageable solution? If not, we may have to update and improve our services.
Round 4 – Exploring the landscape of Mars
After the final improvement cycle, we are fully prepared for this final round. The MarsLander has landed on Mars and starts its 2 trips on Mars. Are all issues solved to guarantee that all data will be collected as agreed and on time? Did we align with the vendors to be sure we have enough capacity to send and store data? Did we deliver all requested features on time and are we able to support them? Did we improve the multifunctional teams by sharing knowledge and experience? This round is the last opportunity to achieve our mission goals before we put MarsLander into sleeping mode. This is the moment to celebrate the success of the mission.
