DevOps Practitioner

Course Description:

This 2-day course builds upon the DevOps fundamentals. The key focus of DevOps Practitioner is on the four skill areas that have been defined by DASA and are required for successful DevOps results. The course helps you know why the four skills: courage, teambuilding, leadership, and continuous improvement, are the necessary skills for a DevOps environment.

DevOps Practitioner is designed to provide the core education necessary to put DevOps into practice. With the help of DevOps theory, pragmatic examples and exercises, and interactive group discussions and role plays, the course will help you understand how to apply the necessary skills to practice DevOps.

Audience:

• Individuals involved in IT development, IT operations, or IT Service Management
• Individuals whose role are affected by DevOps and continuous delivery, such as:

• DevOps Engineers
• Product Owners
• Integration Specialists
• Operations Managers
• Incident and Change Managers
• System Administrators
• Network Administrators
• Business Managers
• Automation Architects
• Enterprise Architects

Learning Objectives:

At the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Explain the importance of DevOps culture and the aspects that can influence it.
• Explain why courage, teambuilding, leadership, and continuous improvement are required in a DevOps environment.
• Explain why courage is essential to enable trust, honesty, and experimentation.
• Identify and evaluate different types of behavior in a DevOps environment.
• Recognize the signals indicating impediments and/or team dysfunctions.
• Describe how to form good DevOps teams and assess their maturity.
• List the effects of happiness and motivation on team performance.
• Identify how leaders encourage feedback and transparency.
• Discuss the factors that leaders can influence to build trust.
• Explain how and why leaders promote a “Safe to fail” environment.
• Analyze value streams to improve throughput and flow.
• Facilitate the tools for continuous improvement: structured problem-solving workshops, Story Mapping sessions, and retrospectives.

Prerequisites:

• Required: DASA DevOps Fundamentals Certificate
• Recommended: Basic familiarity with Agile, Scrum, Lean, and ITSM principles

Course Materials:

• For Participants
  • Course Book (eBook or printed)
• For Instructors
  • Presentations
  • Course Book (eBook)

Note: A few of the exercises that will be performed in the classroom require cards and a sheet to be printed. You will find these cards and sheet in the Instructor Package.

Course Outline:

Course Introduction

• Let’s Get to Know Each Other
• Course Overview
• Course Objectives
• Course Agenda
• Course Book
• Group Discussions
• Exam

Teambuilding

• Design Teams:

• Introduction to a DevOps Team
• Characteristics of a DevOps Team
• Boundaries for a DevOps Team

• Build Teams:

• Creating High Performance Teams
• Feedback: Giving and Taking
• Shared Responsibility and Accountability

• Governance:

• Governance on Three Levels
  • Governance Within a Team
  • Governance Between Teams
  • Governance Between Organizations
• Scaling
• External Suppliers

DevOps Leadership

• Build Culture:

• Create the Right Environment
• Change the Habitual Behavior
• Fail Fast to Improve
• Maintain the Agile Soil

• Create Purpose:

• Know the Importance of Storytelling
• Define the Purpose of Having a Purpose
• Relate Alignment with Autonomy

• Be a Servant Leader:

• Give Control to the Team
• Inspire and Support the Team
• Make Your Own Leadership Manifesto

• Focus on Success:

• Customer Value and Team Success
• Measure and Steer Value

Courage

• Build Courage:

• Importance of Courage
• Out of Your Comfort Zone
• Resilience
• Courage in Relationship with Leadership and Feedback
• Courage at the Team Level
• Dealing with Failure
• Think Different:
  • Think Different on a Day-to-day Basis
    • During Standups
    • Standup from Hell
    • 10th Man Rule
  • Think Different in an Organized Way
    • Open Allocation Time
    • Guilds

Value – Customer Centric Action

• Different Aspects of Value:

• Customer Value
• The Different ‘Voices’

• Stakeholder Management:

• Know Your Stakeholders
• Categorize the Stakeholders

• Combining Lean Startup and DevOps:

• The Lean Startup Process
• The Lean Startup Versus Chaos
• Combining the Lean Startup and DevOps

• The Power of Story Mapping:

• Product/Service Development Approaches
• Need for Story Mapping
• Creating Story Maps

Continuous Improvement

• Build Flow:

• Build Optimal Flow
• Multitasking and One Piece Flow
• Little’s Law and Optimization of Process Lead Time
• Valualize Flow
• Flow and Resource Utilization

• Types of Continuous Improvement:

• Kaizen
• Radical Change

• Continuous Improvement Tools:

• Kaizen Event
• Value Stream Mapping
• Visual Management
• Retrospective
• Daily Standup
• Five Times ‘Why’

Exam Preparation Guide

Exam Information

Exam Facts

Delivery	Online or Paper-based
Format	Closed Book (Participants can bring scratch paper)
Proctoring	Web proctored/In-class proctored
Duration	45 minutes (Additional 15 minutes for non-native English speaker)
# of Questions	12 Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs)
Pass Grade	60% (36 points out of 60 to be earned)

Exam Prerequisites

• Participants have to hold the DASA DevOps Fundamentals certification in order to take DASA DevOps Practitioner exam.
• It is recommended that the participant has completed the DASA DevOps Practitioner training.

Exam Location

• Classroom
• Remote (at any approved location with a webcam (home/office)

Exam Planning

• Exams can be taken on the last day of the course or later.