Team Competence Model

Helps individuals and teams to determine how ready they are for DevOps, and if the team has the right set of skills and capabilities to achieve high-performance levels.

The DASA Team Competence Model describes the essential skills needed in a DevOps team. DASA has identified 4 skill areas, and 8 knowledge areas, and outlined what the expected behavior or knowledge is for each of these 12 capabilities.

Team Competence Model
To learn more about the meaning of each of the 5 levels for the team competence levels have a look at the DASA DevOps Reference Model.

DASA DevOps Reference Model

Skill Areas

  1. Courage: Evangelism, coaching, self-confidence, proactivity, reflection, trust, open discussions, experimentation, fail fast, courage to change.
  2. Teambuilding: Understand the other’s point of view, collaboration, mutual accountability, common purpose, ability to integrally support the service/product.
  3. DevOps Leadership: Facilitating teams to high performance, humility, transparency, Service lifecycle mindset, Stakeholder management.
  4. Continuous improvement: Today we do our work better than yesterday, kaizen mindset, quality at the source, first time right, knowledge-sharing, ability to adapt.

Knowledge Areas

  1. Business Value Optimization: Use of the IT service in real life, including direct feedback loop of user comments to team, service level management, definition of done, business activity/performance monitoring, business case management.
  2. Business Analysis: Functional requirements, non-functional requirements, longer term development of business process (based on translation of market developments), data analysis, and refinement.
  3. Architecture & Design: Ensuring fit between developments and current situation, overall service design, patterns & styles.
  4. Programming: Software engineering mastery, everything as code, data management.
  5. Continuous Delivery: Automated testing, deployment and release management, configuration management, version control, cloud, containerization, feature-driven delivery.
  6. Test Specification: Design of test cases, test concepts.
  7. Infrastructure Engineering: Technical monitoring, performance management (e.g load balancing etc.), capacity and availability management, reliability engineering, cloud, containerization.
  8. Security, Risk & Compliance: Security, service continuity planning.
Niels Loader
The role of the IT engineer will become more generic as DevOps teams develop and IT people become more multi-skilled. The key to working in this environment is to recognize that a skills and knowledge set is needed on these teams. Niels Loader, Principal Consultant Quint

12 Skill and knowledge Areas required for DevOps

A well-balanced set of skills and competences within a DevOps team is what separates successful teams from those who fail. Every team needs to have expertise in all of the 12 capabilities in the DASA Team Competence Model. Everyone requires to be ‘competent’ and have a foundation level knowledge of DevOps principles and practices. Not everyone needs to be at the ‘expert’ level in all 12 areas, as long as together as a team, the ‘expert’ level is covered for all 12 capabilities. DASA’s basic principles for achieving success with DevOps:
  • Everyone in a team needs to be able to understand the key DevOps principles and practices, and operate at level 2 ‘competent’ in the DASA Team Competence Model
  • Not everyone needs to be a rockstar in all 12 capabilities, as long as within the team all 12 capabilities are covered at the ‘expert’ level.

A Journey of the DASA Team Competence Model in practice

Let’s take a look at the journey of a DevOps team at a large bank to see what this means in practice.

5 minutes to find out your skill gap

Take the DASA DevOps Competence Quickscan to see if you have the skills to work on a DevOps team.

The scan contains 24 questions and your results are immediately visible.

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