DASA DevOps Leader

The DASA DevOps Leader qualification is aimed at managers and leaders who have working experience and interest in taking a (formal or informal) leadership role. These leaders help teams and organizations to transform to become more nimble, grow revenues and profits, accelerate new value propositions, increase the performance of teams and get more business value out of IT.

The course consists of 8 practice-based sessions, designed to accelerate your understanding of challenges involved in leading a transformation towards a DevOps oriented style of working and operating, and the leadership approaches to mitigate risks in such transformations.

When members of an organization are motivated, work autonomously, and feel ownership in an environment where there is a well-articulated vision, enabling (formal and/or informal) leadership and a culture of trust, the organization creates and achieves maximum business value.

Focus on Leadership
As an IT Leader in an organization that wishes to realize the benefits of DevOps philosophy and approach, you are aware of the role you are expected to play in organizational transformation and scaling. You are accountable for creating a high-performance digital organization consisting of autonomous high-performance teams. Being responsible for leading the DevOps transformation and creating the framework for teams to scale and achieve maximum business value, you should know how to establish transformation teams, management structures, organizational design, and governance models.

By applying essential leadership practices that eliminate old corporate management philosophies and practices, you can grow the right type of culture to attract and retain the right people and transform their ways of working.

Focus on a DevOps Transformation
The course focuses on leading, driving, and supporting a successful DevOps transformation in practice. With lots of best practices, patterns, and anti-patterns from organizational culture, change management, leadership, people, process, and technology points of view, you will understand the various dimensions for informal and formal leadership required to create high-performance digital organizations. More importantly, you will assess and evaluate the available leadership best practices to transform your organizations.

Through real-life case studies and experiences consisting of both successes and failures, you will explore the mechanisms to apply the right transformation techniques and approaches that are fit for purpose in your organizational context. It will help you develop the right skills and competences of a modern and digital-savvy leader.

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 progress during the transformation phases, will dramatically increase the chances of success.

Module 0: Introducing DASA DevOps Leader

• Explain the learning outcomes of this course.
• Explain the positioning of this course in the DASA portfolio.
• Know about the basic structure of this course.
• Discuss the course expectations.

Module 1: DevOps and Building High-Performance Digital Organizations

• Analyze what digital disruption trends exist and how organizations can best cope with these trends.
• Reflect on how DevOps as a discipline has matured over the years and what schools of thought currently exist.
• Recognize the importance of leadership for being successful in organizational and digital transformations.

Module 2: Defining DevOps Leadership

• Reflect on what constitutes leadership and critically appraise contemporary definitions of leadership.
• Analyze the concepts of leadership and management, their importance in the 21st century, and critical differences between both disciplines.
• Compare and contrast contemporary leadership philosophies.
• Analyze the DASA DevOps leadership framework and be able to self-assess your existing and future-self leadership profile based on this framework.
• Become self-aware of your leadership strengths, weaknesses, and ambitions to reflect on what focus is needed to grow as a high-performing DevOps leader.

Module 3: Shaping the DevOps Transformation

• Recognize fundamental errors that organizations often make when doing transformations and assess how to prevent making these errors.
• Analyze various approaches to effectively define and communicate the goals of your (DevOps) transformation.
• Create a value case for a digital transformation to turn an organization into an HPDO.
• Critically assess the changing climate in your organization using contemporary change management models.
• Recognize critical ingredients for successfully setting up the DevOps transformation in your organization.
• Distinguish patterns and anti-patterns for creating a compelling change story in your organization.

Module 4: Creating Conditions for Success – People and Culture

• Recognize critical ingredients for successfully setting up the DevOps transformation in your organization.
• Distinguish patterns and anti-patterns for creating a compelling change story in your organization.
• Recognize the critical ingredients of a high-performance culture and what is needed for employees to thrive.
• Examine leadership patterns for creating a high-performance culture and workforce.
• Compare and contrast approaches to implement organization-wide DevOps talent management strategies and practices.
• Analyze and discuss approaches to invest in the right type of leadership development in your organization.

Module 5: Creating Conditions for Success – Processes and Governance

• Explain how embracing the DevOps principles and practices will impact the processes and governance in your organization. 
• Elaborate on achieving high-performance at scale in your organization and critically appraise various scaling frameworks in this regard.
• Analyze approaches to manage value in your organization effectively.
• Reflect on how leadership behavior should fit the company’s way of working and what leaders can do further to optimize organizational processes and governance in a DevOps context.

Module 6: Creating Conditions for Success – Architecture and Technology

• Understand how the CIO and traditional IT department need to evolve when building a High-Performance Digital Organization based on DevOps principles?
• Analyze various approaches to accelerate and improve your IT function to eliminate IT bottlenecks and manage technical debt properly.

Module 7: Leading Successful Transformations

• Reflect on your leadership behavior in the context of an ongoing DevOps transformation and understand various interventions that you could employ.
• Assess and recognize different resistance types you could face during a DevOps transformation and deal with this effectively.
• Use introspection to take a step back from operational work and reflect on your effectiveness as a leader and use introspection and intervision to adjust the course when needed.
• Learn from “stories from the trenches” from experienced DevOps leaders to identify and internalize leadership patterns and anti-patterns.  

Module 8: Putting it into Action

• Note: This module has a different approach than the other seven modules of DASA DevOps Leader. This module is a concluding session of the training with a focus on sharing knowledge and experiences. Course participants will help each other by reviewing draft presentations of the DevOps Transformation Roadmap for the final assessment of this course.

The DASA DevOps Leader qualification is aimed at managers and leaders who have working experience and interest in taking a (formal or informal) leadership role. These leaders help teams and organizations to transform to become more nimble, grow revenues and profits, accelerate new value propositions, increase the performance of teams and get more business value out of IT. Some of the roles include:

• (senior) Business/IT managers
• Executives
• Team leaders
• Project managers
• Program managers
• Consultants
• Change agents
• Coaches
• Organizational development specialists
• Product owners
• Product managers

DASA DevOps Leader-certified professionals can:

• Recollect key drivers for digital disruption and understand DevOps’ role in digital transformations and DevOps Leaders’ role in leading these transformations.
• Distinguish contemporary leadership styles and practices and their pros and cons in a DevOps environment, and apply these to their organization and/or transformation.
• Apply learnings to create a value case, ‘why,’ and scope 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 an 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 considering multiple perspectives, such as people, process, and technology.
• Lead a transformation within their organizational context with a key focus on DASA DevOps principles, values, and practices.
• Own the digital leadership journey, throughout the transformation, by continuously reflecting, learning, and (re)defining the leadership style.