BT’s managed services division supports the technology infrastructure that keeps the United Kingdom running. Critical national infrastructure, blue light services, hospitals, air traffic control: for Val Wilson, then running managed services operations at BT, these were the customers her teams supported around the clock. When BT committed to a multi-year ServiceNow migration, moving from legacy tooling to a platform that would eventually support AI-driven operations. For a programme of that scale, the technology was the straightforward part.
The challenge
The migration wasn’t primarily a technical problem. BT had a clear strategic direction: establish ServiceNow as the foundation, build towards AI ops, and deliver a service meaningfully better for customers and colleagues. The difficulty was human. A programme of that size takes years, and over years, without visible progress, scepticism accumulates. People who’d heard about transformation but hadn't seen it materialise were understandably cautious. Some feared that tools designed to automate and accelerate work might eventually reduce the need for their roles.
“Until people physically see it happening,” Val explains, “sometimes it’s quite difficult to get on board.”
According to Bain’s 2024 analysis, 88 per cent of business transformations fail to achieve their original ambitions, and the primary causes are typically engagement and adoption rather than technology. For Val, the risk wasn’t that ServiceNow wouldn’t deliver; it was that the people who needed to embrace it would have disengaged before the benefits became visible.
“If people don’t believe in what you’re doing as a transformation programme, it’s going to fail. There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind.”
The decision
SXP was brought in to address the gap between strategy and belief. The brief wasn’t additional training in the conventional sense. It was more specific: give people a credible, tangible experience of where the programme was heading before they could see it in their day-to-day work.
Val first encountered the simulation through itSMF, where SXP ran a competition for industry practitioners. The experience was enough for her to see its potential at a much larger scale. BT ran three trials with different groups before proceeding, with Val participating in the first herself. For her, the logic was straightforward: if she could understand the operation end to end and feel the simulation's impact, she could judge what it would mean for everyone else.
What made the proposition workable was the degree to which SXP tailored the experience to BT’s specific context. The simulation ran inside a BT narrative, framed around BT’s own transformation strategy. Participants experienced something that felt continuous with the programme they were already part of, rather than a generic exercise imported from outside.
“You’re using the SXP platform and game,” Val says, “but we’re tailoring everything around that to make it very specific for BT. Anybody coming in wouldn’t necessarily realise. They’d think it’s a BT tool, a BT training session.”
How it ran
Each session was structured around a half-day format, bringing together cross-functional groups: team leaders, technical staff, project managers, and colleagues from transformation and tooling. People who didn’t normally work together found themselves making shared decisions in the simulation, building relationships as a by-product of the exercise.
The game worked through practical decisions about which ServiceNow modules to prioritise and in what order. As participants made choices, the simulation demonstrated the downstream consequences. Service mapping, for example, wasn’t an abstract recommendation from a slide deck; played through in simulation, it produced visible outcomes: shorter incidents, correlated parent and child tickets, faster routes to root cause. The value proposition that had previously lived in presentations became something people experienced directly.
“It’s not just me talking PowerPoints,” Val says. “It’s actively getting them to see it in simulation and start to believe it.”
The game's competitive structure kept engagement high throughout. Teams moved up and down the leaderboard, made mistakes, understood why, and adjusted. Because the decisions were collective rather than individual, no single person carried the pressure of being wrong. People could see the consequences of choices without those choices affecting a live operation.
“You can fail, you can make a mistake. You can go from the top of the leaderboard to the bottom in an instant, and then back around. And you can understand why that’s happened.”
The results
More than 200 people have now been through the simulation as part of BT’s ServiceNow programme. Across those sessions, the average recommendation score has been above 9 out of 10.
The programme itself is still running. Val describes it as roughly at stage three of ten, meaning the most significant outcomes lie ahead. What the simulation has delivered so far is the precondition for those outcomes: a workforce that understands the direction of travel, has seen the purpose of the foundational work, and has good reasons to care about what comes next.
“It’s got the buy-in from people that they’re actively looking forward to what we’re doing,” Val says. “People can start to see some of how that simulation is playing through in their day-to-day job.”
The programme is still mid-flight, and the full picture won’t be clear for years. But the foundational work is no longer something people need to be persuaded to do.