Following on from the amazing success of 2025 Challenge Cup competition, where ‘Team VOIS’ were crowned 2025 champions, we are delighted to announce that the itSMF UK Challenge Cup is back for 2026!
Facilitated by our delivery partner SXP, teams of up to four colleagues will compete against other organisations by playing one of their business simulations – the winning team will be the one that achieves the highest score!
The competition will culminate with a presentation to the winning team at the PSMA26 awards dinner in November – along with a prize of £1,000 for their selected charity.
Open to all member organisations and FREE to take part, submit your team entry today.
The Challenge
The essence of the business simulation will be for each team to run the IT services for a large enterprise. Although fictitious, the business model will be based on a real business, with the strategies and their impacts in the simulation based on industry researched and recognised metrics, adding to the realism of the experience.
While it is a competition, each ‘heat’ is designed to be a learning opportunity so that the whole competition can add real value to those that participate.
Key Points
- Like the real world, participants review reports and dashboards in order to identify strategies to address immediate business needs, e.g. reducing lost opportunity and ticket volume through to improving the ‘flow’ of incident, request and development pipelines.
- Learn how practices and technologies combine to drive business performance and customer satisfaction, as well as boosting business productivity and employee experience.
- Instant feedback on strategies selected versus the happy path reinforces learning and self-efficacy.
- Leaderboards show how teams are competing against their peers.
- Think of this as a complex business and IT model shrunk down into an interactive sandbox, where risk free experimentation can be done.
Challenge Cup Format
- Virtual delivery via MS Teams.
- Each team competes once in a 3 hour heat scheduled during October.
- Max 4 players per team – ideally mixed knowledge/experience.
- Up to 4 teams per member organisation.
- Mandatory pre-event ‘kick off’ for Team Captains.
Team Entry
Please make your team submission here before the close of business Friday 11 September – we will be in touch with all Team Captains to confirm your place and finalise dates and arrangements.
itSMF UK
itSMF UK is the country’s leading membership association for service management professionals – with members ranging from individual service management practitioners to large multi-national organisations.
We have spent the last three decades helping ITSM professionals both to be better and to do better. As the first of an international network of itSMF chapters, we continue to enrich the working lives of our members through our conference and events, professional guidance, focused content, annual awards, competency management, leadership council, member groups, and new communities of practice.
View our membership video or visit us at www.itsmf.co.uk