DASA DevOps Leader

DevOps culture requires better leadership capabilities. Leaders who make improvements will foster a healthy environment conducive to change. It is crucial for DevOps adoption to have a DevOps Leader to assist in developing, influencing, implementing, or motivating a cultural transformation. This is the best catalyst for becoming a great leader.

As a DASA DevOps Leader™, you'll be able to practice leadership values alongside like-minded DevOps leaders and also lead, drive, and support a successful DevOps transformation in practice. In this course, you will be introduced to state-of-the-art and practical examples as well as key notions and principles that will inspire and challenge you to transform your opinion into useful strategies.

DASA DevOps Leader certification™ will examine the essential role of CIO's in leading, shap-ing and managing the digital business and provide an understanding of how modern enterprise architecture is the best opportunity for CIO’s to manage digital transformation, with a constant focus on creating value. It will also examine how CIO’s can use technology to change long-standing revenue models and operational structures across business functions.

The evaluation process is the last stage in the certification that will equip you with the skills necessary to overcome obstacles in cultural transformation. Thanks to this DevOps leader training, you will have the ability to think critically about the best leadership techniques and style for your particular situation and organization.

Course contents:

The course is developed around DASA’s research on state of the art and state of the practice examples on why DevOps transformations fail or succeed. This research, bundled with a toolkit for kick-starting successful DevOps transformations, and calibrating the progress during the transformation phases, will dramatically increase your chances of success.

Module 1: DevOps and Building High-Performance Digital Organizations

The module emphasizes the core concepts of DevOps, change management, and the role leaders play in leading DevOps transformation. This knowledge will enable you to analyze exist-ing market trends in digital disruption, discuss the impact of these trends on a typical organiza-tion, and understand the urgency for digital transformation for organizations to remain competi-tive.

Module 2: Defining DevOps Leadership

The module emphasizes contemporary leadership and management styles and practices. This knowledge will enable you to examine, evaluate, and adopt the best leadership styles and prac-tices during a DevOps transformation. In other words, the module will empower you to start acting as a DevOps Leader.

Module 3: Shaping the DevOps Transformation

The module emphasizes defining the ‘Why’ of the DevOps transformation and explains various approaches to define the objectives, value, and scope of this transformation. This knowledge will enable you to create an effective change story for the DevOps transformation. The story that you would like to lead and create the required climate in your organization for the upcom-ing change.

Module 4: Creating Conditions for Success – People and Culture

The module emphasizes creating specific conditions from the people’s perspective to increase the success of the DevOps transformation. It highlights key characteristics of a culture in which individuals thrive and contribute to becoming a High-Performance Digital Organization. This knowledge will enable you to determine what talent management strategies and leadership prac-tices you should adopt for your DevOps transformation to be most effective.

Module 5: Creating Conditions for Success - Processes and Governance

The module emphasizes creating specific conditions from the process and governance per-spective to increase the success of the DevOps transformation. It highlights key characteristics of how to set up an organization thriving on autonomous, end-to-end responsible product teams for generating as much business value for the organization as possible. Business-IT barriers, complex or bureaucratic governance structures, or other constraints that slow down the flow of work do not exist in such organizations and their processes. This knowledge will enable you to create the right structure and way of working for your High-Performance Digital organization based on proven DevOps practices.

Module 6: Creating Conditions for Success - Architecture and Technology

The module emphasizes creating specific conditions from the IT architecture and technology perspective to increase the success of the DevOps transformation. It highlights key character-istics of how organizations benefit from modern IT infrastructure, continuous delivery, and scalable modern software architectures. The module also explains how best to optimize be-tween autonomy at the (DevOps) team level and at the centralized governance, rules, and regu-lations level to ensure high-quality solutions. This knowledge will enable you to find a balance in your DevOps organization for leveraging state-of-the-art technology and ways of working on the one hand, and proven metrics, governance systems, and built-in quality controls on the other hand.

Module 7: Leading Successful Transformations

The module emphasizes creating key organizational culture preconditions for a successful DevOps Transformation and following the required steps to effectively bootstrap this transfor-mation. Insights into the organization’s status quo (in relationship to the goals and ambitions of the transformation) is equally important as building an effective transformation team. This knowledge will enable you to successfully get a DevOps transformation off the ground by adopting proven change management and leadership practices.

Module 8: Putting it into Action

The module emphasizes what leaders should do during their DevOps transformation to deal with change management and conduct proper stakeholder management. Transformations often result in unforeseen responses from people, and everybody responds differently to change. This knowledge will enable you to understand what makes people tick and how best to com-municate and collaborate with them to drive a DevOps transformation successfully.

Exercises

There will be plenty of exercises to be done in your time between modules. Also, before the first module, there will be some pre-tasks to be done.

For each of the eight modules, there will be pre-tasks and after-tasks. You are encouraged to take the time to do these tasks to make the most out of the course. In total, you could use 1 week for the different tasks between the modules. The more time you use, the more you get out of it. The scope of the exercise tasks is within your own organization, so all the tasks will directly benefit your own organization’s DevOps journey. NDA’s will be done at the first ses-sion.

Assessment information

The DASA DevOps Leader assessment is based on building a transformation plan and present-ing/defending this plan with two independent Assessors from the pool of highly experienced senior professionals who have led and been part of similar transformations before.

The plan that you develop will require you to apply the relevant frameworks that are covered during the course while building a well thought through transformation journey covering various dimensions of the transformation.

This assessment approach is grounded in the experiential learning and activity-based learning philosophies, focused on learning through reflection. Participants are encouraged to begin constructing their plan from week 1 of the program, while continuing to add to it during the entire 8-week course.

Learning objectives

When you have acquired the required knowledge from this certification program, you will be able to:

• Recollect key drivers for digital disruption, and understand the role DevOps plays in digital transformations, and the role DevOps Leaders can play in leading these trans-formations.
• Distinguish contemporary leadership styles and practices and their pros and cons in a DevOps environment, and apply these to your organization and/or transformation.
• Apply learnings to create a value case, 'why,' and scope of your DevOps transfor-mations.
• Understand key ingredients that organizations and leaders need to invest in for creating the right “smell of the place,” attracting and retaining talented employees, and develop-ing a high-performance culture in your organization.
• Analyze how to change traditional “Business vs. IT” operating models and governance structures to DevOps-supporting ones.
• Analyze how best to optimize between team autonomy and ownership on the one hand, and architectural, technical, and organizational constraints on the other hand to manage quality, IT risk, and compliance in a DevOps organization.
• Compare and contrast personal and organizational leadership patterns and anti-patterns in the various stages of a DevOps transformation and from various perspectives, such as people, process, and technology.
• Lead a transformation within your organizational context with a focus on the key DASA DevOps principles, values, and practices.
• Own your digital leadership journey throughout the transformation by continuously re-flecting, learning, and (re)defining your leadership style.

Target group

Anyone starting or leading a move towards increased reliability; anyone interested in modern IT leadership and organizational change approaches.

The course aims at (prospective) managers and leaders who have working experience or inter-est in taking a (formal or informal) leadership role to help teams and organizations to transform - grow, accelerate, increase their performance, and get more business value out of IT.

Prerequisites

Basic familiarity with DevOps, Agile, and Scrum is beneficial.