Tips to Building Your Business Simulation Strategy

Hello SimDevGroup Community-
Lately, we've been getting calls with people asking, "What is the best way to build a strategy that includes using a business simulation?" This is a great question and to be honest, we didn't really have any tips to help. So we took the time to create some. We then shared them with some of our partners and in the end, everyone gave us their thumbs up to the following 5 tips:
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Tips to Building Your Business Simulation Strategy:

• Become one with your corporate strategy- Before you build your simulation strategy for business training, you should know your corporate strategy very well. Talk to your corporate leaders about this.
• Know what drives the the business- Every enterprise has drivers that push the the organization forward in order to achieve it's strategic success. Sometimes its net profits, other times its cash on hand, or it could be just about anything. You'll learn what drives the business by reading your CEO's letter to shareholders in your annual report. At least this is a good place to start.
• Clearly define your training and development goals- You should have a very clear set of desired outcomes from your training and development programs. Take a look at those and ask yourself, "What content really needs an action learning module?" You'll quickly see what does and doesn't. Whatever does, see if a business simulation exercise would help with this.
• Look at your development resources- Whether we like it or not, we're all shackled by what's available. You'll need some good strong engineering and instructional resources. Once you do this inventory, you'll quickly realize if a business simulation is within reach.
• Examine the size of the training program- The training program you are thinking of using a business simulation within should be pretty healthy in size. If its a 1/2 day program, chances are the time and resource commitment might not be worth it. But if its a multi-day leadership development course. Then yes, its definitely worth the time.

Welp, that's what our HR leader friends within companies all agreed on. Its high level, but it does seem to fit within that 80/20 rule we've talked about before. Of course, there are other business simulation strategies, but these seem to cover the most ground to get things started.
Hope this helps!