Diving into Business Processes with a Role Playing Game

A lively and fast-paced exchange between students took place last week in Angelo Ditillo's Performance Measurement and Control Systems class during a role-playing game organized to simulate the valuation of certain investment projects within a company. The experiment was designed to illustrate to students all the multidimensional aspects of these evaluation processes and to develop their ability to test themselves.

In the first part of the game, the class, which is part of the Master of Science in Accounting, Financial Management and Control (AFC), was divided into seven groups. One group was assigned the role of project evaluation committee whilst each of the three projects to be evaluated was given one promoting group, who worked on the presentation with data and arguments in support, and one group dedicated instead to analyzing the critical aspects. In the second part, the promoting groups presented their projects (for example the introduction of a new product or the acquisition of a company) to the committee that, after a debate with the opposing groups, announced the most deserving project on the basis of financial, strategic and risk aspects.

"It's a role-play simulation designed to allow students to understand and learn all the processes that are part of an evaluation of a project. They analyze in fact not only the financial aspects but also those of strategy, credibility and risk," explains Ditillo, Program Director of AFC. "They thus develop the ability to assess a project from all the different points of view but also the ability to present effectively and their dialectical and confrontation skills."

"With this experience you go beyond studying books or a simple case study," says Fabio Sperati Ruffoni, a first-year AFC student. "This approach favors a different analysis – more participatory and more comprehensive."

"We first analyzed the theory and the data and then worked on the presentation – just as you would in the workplace. A simulation of this kind is thus very useful for our future career," says Moritz Howaldt, a German student in his first year of AFC, who was part of one of the promoting groups. "We all found ourselves thrown into a new situation, everyone had to be prepared to be called up and you learn to be flexible."