We wish you a merry DevOps!

As we are nearing the end of 2020, you would think business would slow down a bit and people would start to look forward to some well-deserved holidays. Especially so after such a turbulent year, which has been turned upside down and sideways with COVID, quarantines, teleworking, ...

But not for us. If you have a customer who decides to invest in their people by launching an internal training program, and is willing to really make a big push in bringing their employees up to speed, that actually doesn’t mean slowing down at all. It means that for such an opportunity, you are willing to go the extra mile, and run a whole series of training sessions.

Particularly when this gives you the opportunity to work in the field of DevOps and introduce dozens of trainees from across the globe to the wonderful world of DASA (Devops Agile Skills Association). When your trainees include Agile Coaches, Product Owners, Security engineers, Developers, Testers, Operation engineers, getting everyone on a level playing field is not always easy and can be a real challenge.

That is precisely what keeps it interesting for us as trainers: it drives us to stay innovative and keeps us on our toes. In some sessions, we came up with interesting examples of our own pets, as well as the pets and babies of the trainees working from home, to explain some of the basic concepts of DevOps! These kind of experiments and examples are necessary to get the group together during these virtual trainings.

In this specific case, we ran a series of DASA Fundamentals courses. In essence, it’s a basic set of ingredients ensuring a common understanding of fundamental DEVOPS concepts and their definitions.  It means that all of our trainees were focusing on a wide variety of cultural topics and the mindset behind DevOps, while at the same time being introduced to other practices like ITIL4®, Lean, Agile, Modern Infra, Cloud and Operations.

For many involved, the focus on culture and mindset was a bit strange at the start, because for a lot of IT professionals, unfortunately, the main focus of DevOps still is on a ‘toolchain’. But the old creed is more valid now than ever: “a fool with a tool, is still a fool”.

So in these trainings, we didn’t focus on tools at all. And that resulted in very happy trainees.

We got very open and interesting discussions, and a lot of feedback and insights. Additionally, the advantage of running a whole series of these trainings within the same company, rather than running separate open  calendar trainings, is that this also allowed us to provide valuable and aligned, consolidated feedback to the organizers of their internal Academy.

In a true DevOps style, that allowed them in turn to adapt and improve along the way, making their program ever stronger, and moving forward in supporting their digital transformation. They now start to have the foundation of a strong DevOps community, are starting to speak the same language across their organization, and can reach out across their different teams to share their experiences and learn from this.

From our side, we have seen, we have learned, and we’ll also try to improve. So in the end, everybody wins, and DevOps spreads joy all around.  Sounds like it’s time for holidays now, so all that remains is to wish everyone a Merry DevOps.

And remember: If you are interested to build your own training program together with us in 2021, visit https://training.ctg.com/ or get in touch!