BSM International. Where we all get to stare at fancy mock network diagrams, solve logic puzzles, and pretend to feed hungry airline passengers.
Ah, yes. Atwell Williams’ podcast brings back memories of the BSM simulation course.
A few weeks ago, I also stumbled across this review of our BSM International training class. The article is titled ” Riding the Fright Simulator” and it’s a first-hand account of the BSM International airport simulation course that BMC offers that helped me understand the connections between IT services and the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), a common set of standards first developed by the UK government. I know I sure learned a lot there.
Here’s an excerpt from the article, which absolutely nails the way you feel during the course:
Clive Ford was looking forward to a quiet day at the office. After all, there was nothing complicated about the outfit he was running — just an ordinary four-terminal international airport.
But then all hell broke loose. The sky started falling, the wheels were coming off and he knew it was going to be one of those days.
The airport went ballistic, he recalls. The radar tower malfunctioned, emergency services were out of control, poisoned food was being loaded on to aircraft, the sky was dark with banked-up planes and the media were hammering on his door.
As soon as one problem was sorted, another slammed into view. So far no one had been hurt, but it seemed like time would soon take care of that. And meanwhile the crises were eating dollars — millions of them.
All rattling good fun, Mr Ford says in retrospect. The best day’s training course he has ever attended.
This course is a great introduction to why the heck you’d want to manage your business services through IT technology. I won’t give away too much of the course, but I will brag that my group was one of the first to come up with a display board for a knowledge base. Leave it to the tech writer to be excited about a fake knowledge base. Solving problems efficiently was actually an adrenaline rush, which is suprising, since the course was also a first introduction to BSM and ITIL for me.