Description

The Leading Change Simulation gives students a real life experience in leading an organization through a big and difficult change. As the leader of the change, you have a team of 9 part-time (25%) resources from 3 different organizations (including your own) to help you in successfully planning and moving everyone in 3 organizations from a nice new building to an old building. With the Leading Change Simulation students learn what leading a change is like as they make real decisions and get real feedback as they manage a simulated real life change project using real life people within a real life company. As you make decisions and run the simulation Simulated stakeholders and team members add the human dimension that is missing from simple case studies. The simulation powered learning is practical, engaging, intense and challenging. It’s designed to give students the practice and confidence they need to apply change management skills on the job. This simulated project consists of 4 tasks spread over 15 weeks (iterations) with 9 team members to staff the project.

The Leading Change Simulation is a dynamic decision-driven simulation designed to replicate the ongoing decisions a leader makes on a typical change project from the project planning phase through the execution, monitoring, controlling and closing phases. The simulation was designed by a distinguished team of change leaders, project managers, program managers, and technical and business leaders with over a century of combined experience.

Students learn through a computer simulation of real life people, a real life company, and a real life project. The learning comes from doing; making mistakes, experiencing successes, and repetition. Each change project unfolds differently depending on student decisions and on random unplanned events. Our simulations do not have students input decisions and then tell them that it was a right or wrong decision with an explanation like many simulations. Students see the results of their decisions similar to what they would see on a real change project by giving them time based feedback and using dynamically updated project control reports. The feedback might be a negative impact on schedule, or a positive impact on task progress, or it could be feedback received simulated days or weeks later from a team member or stakeholder.

Our simulations are very realistic, including the number of simulation weeks executed. Some simulations only have a few executions which doesn’t give the students enough practice to really learn change management. Our simulations require student teams plan, execute, monitor, control, and close the change project. What drives the results of the simulation and determines the student success are the decisions they make as they execute the change project each week.

The Leading Change simulation is only available as part of our Leading Successful Change class.