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, shaping 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. 

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 transformations.
• 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 transformations.
• 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 developing 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 reflecting, learning, and (re)defining your leadership style.

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 existing market trends in digital disruption, discuss the impact of these trends on a typical organization, and understand the urgency for digital transformation for organizations to remain competitive.

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 practices 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 upcoming 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 practices 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 perspective 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 characteristics of how organizations benefit from modern IT infrastructure, continuous delivery, and scalable modern software architectures. The module also explains how best to optimize between autonomy at the (DevOps) team level and at the centralized governance, rules, and regulations 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 transformation. 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 communicate and collaborate with them to drive a DevOps transformation successfully.

Anyone starting or leading a move towards increased reliability

• Anyone interested in modern IT leadership and organizational change approaches
• Business Managers
• Business Stakeholders
• Change Agents
• Consultants
• DevOps Practitioners
• IT Directors
• IT Managers
• IT Team Leaders
• Product Owners
• Scrum Masters
• Software Engineers
• Site Reliability Engineers
• System Integrators
• Tool Providers

The DASA DevOps Leader assessment is based on building a transformation plan and presenting/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

Basic familiarity with Agile, Scrum, and DevOps is beneficial. The course aims at (prospective) managers and leaders who have working experience or interest 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.

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