Key Outcomes of DASA’s First Development Workshop
One of the big ideas behind starting DASA was involving the community as a guiding force for building thought leadership. Every certification body or framework owner has a different model for building best practices, but the one that we like best is one where volunteers drive the creation of certification programs based on their expertise and their understanding of the needs of organizations.
DASA anchored this idea in our core values, and described it as follows:
Community Driven: Any party can participate in defining role-based competencies and learning curricula.
This May we organized the first workshop to mark the start of the development of the next series of certification programs for DASA. The objective for this session was to define the scope for the future certification programs and to align on the direction of these programs.
DASA received applications from DevOps and Agile experts from over ten countries, from India to Germany, to Mexico. This intrinsic motivation demonstrates the power of community-driven programs, and the genuine interest of volunteers to contribute to it. In the end, we had 18 participants join us for a full day of interactive brainstorm sessions and discussions, and here are some of the critical outcomes of the meeting.
DASA DevOps Fundamentals – Strong Program, Targeting a broad Audience of Passionate Professionals
The workshop participants had a lot of experience delivering the DASA DevOps Fundamentals courses all over the world. We used the opportunity to align with the audience and scope of the program. We concluded that as designed, the Fundamentals reaches a diverse audience ranging from people who just graduated from school to experienced professionals. The job titles of these professionals are just as distinct, and some classes are only Ops people, others with Dev and various combinations of the audience.
DASA DevOps Fundamentals delivers a complete and holistic picture of the DevOps landscape and allows for instructors to zoom in on the needs of the current audience. We expect that in the future releases the scope will become a bit more narrow as both the market and audience mature.
DASA Professional Level Programs – Building T-shaped Professionals
DASA is passionate about its team-based approach for DevOps. Our Competency model, Principles, and approach is designed for high performing teams delivering business value all the time. For team members, this means that it is essential for them to operate as T-shaped professionals, who can perform many roles within the team. In our approach this means they feel most comfortable working in one of the three domains that we have specified: Enable and Scale, Specify and Verify, Create and Deliver.
The most significant conclusion of the day was that two years after we started DASA, the community validated that the approach stands and that the domain based approach works. The professional level programs that we are designing next continue to be domain based programs, as high performing teams benefit most from broadly skilled professionals. Meaning that DASA will continue on this journey, and will not start offering role-based programs – In the end, everyone is a DevOps engineer!
Enable and Scale Domain (Courage, Team Building, DevOps Leadership, Continuous improvement)
Focuses on the cohesiveness of the team, scaling, and managing the process — therefore an ideal next step for professionals currently operating as Scrum Masters for example.
Specify an Verify Domain (Business Value Optimization, Business Analysis, Architecture and Design, Test Specification)
An ideal next step for product owners and defines what value means for the business, and that the delivery validates that value.
Create and Deliver Domain (Programming, Continuous Delivery, Infrastructure Engineering, Security, Risk, and Compliance)
Developing and releasing new capabilities into the organization and applies to most team members.
The confirmation that DASA’s vision works within an organization and helps to drive business value was fantastic. Almost all of the attendees at the workshop shared an interest to be involved in building out the professional level certifications. Stay tuned to hear more from DASA!
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