About

  Key Characteristics of Learning Design:

• Quality over Quantity: In-depth discussions with peers and getting inspired by all kinds of ambitious people is more important than knowing, reading, or listening to lots of theory. Course participants should plan to do that in their own time. During the course contact hours, the emphasis is on quality discussions with peers facilitated by an experienced trainer. The course teaches an expert-level mindset. During the DASA DevOps Leader journey, participants will fill their backpack by developing a necessary thinking mindset that will enable them to become critical thinkers.
• Growing Leaders, not Certified Professionals: DASA acknowledge hard work and commitment to the DevOps Leader course and be an active part of the community. However, they also dislike too much focus on certifications as the primary goal. The (intrinsic) drive to keep learning and developing themselves, inspire others, share knowledge, and connect with peers is far more rewarding and essential. The DASA DevOps Leader course focuses extensively on boosting personal leadership and targets different types of professionals. It is not developed solely for people with an official mandate to manage or lead.
• Learning by Doing: Contemporary wisdom on learning and development states that people learn most from applying the knowledge (or learning by doing). The DASA DevOps Leader course focuses primarily on “How To” instead of the more common ‘why/what/when/who’ approach still often lectured in classrooms. Becoming successful in leading DevOps transformations requires you first to learn How to Lead. The next step is to create other leaders and positive momentum and culture in the organization that aligns with the transformation goals. The course includes state of the art and state of the practice examples, key concepts, principles, and practices to inspire, provoke, and challenge you to form an opinion and translate it to actionable strategies and activities. The trainer or instructor is an authority on these subjects and a facilitator of this learning process.
• Continuous Learning: Learning is a lifelong process. You can never be done with learning, especially as a leader. Therefore, you will also get a subscription to the DASA community platform that offers a continuous learning experience. DASA was born as a community-driven institute. It is a body of knowledge and is growing that inspires and guides individuals and organizations in their transformations.

Course Information

  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 ActionNote: 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.    

Target Audience

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 

Learning Objectives

 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.

Course Agenda

Standard Format: 8 Virtual Sessions Spread Across 4-12 Weeks 

Session  1

Introducing DASA DevOps Leader 

Module 1: DevOps and Building High-Performance Digital Organizations 

Session  2

Module 2: Defining DevOps Leadership 

Session  3

Module 3: Shaping the DevOps Transformation 

Session  4

Module 4: Creating Conditions for Success – People and Culture 

Session  5

Module 5: Creating Conditions for Success – Processes and Governance 

Session  6

Module 6: Creating Conditions for Success – Architecture and Technology 

Session  7

Module 7: Leading Successful Transformations 

Session  8

Module 8: Putting it into Action