Category: Mentoring
DevOps Fundamentals & Product Owner Training Provider
We’re happy to announce that services gained again the prestigious Training Provider and Accredited trainer status.
Join our online courses and purchase individual consulting!
DevOps Culture Myths and Antipatterns
DASA – the leading DASA organizational culture provider – shared a set of antipatterns, based on myths, which strongly oppose DevOps adoption and adaption. In my practice I often meet “devops engineers” and “we implemented devops, because we have ci/cd”. Let’s understand, what’s difference, and why DevOps culture first and precedes any technical tools, and why tools cannot create devops (rather they can be helpful locally).
DevOps Antipatterns: However, in practice, DevOps has different meanings for different people. Due to this confusion, organizations don’t realize the benefits of DevOps. Here are some antipatterns.
Agile is for development teams, and DevOps is for the downstream teams: Wrong. DevOps is about building end-to-end product teams, who own the product and are responsible for it throughout its lifecycle. These are the teams Amazon and Spotify popularized: the two pizza teams with build-and-run responsibilities.
The DASA DevOps team competency model illustrates the skills and knowledge areas of an end-to-end responsible DevOps team.
DevOps is a CI/CD pipeline: Another common antipattern is to confuse a CI/CD pipeline with DevOps. DevOps is more than implementing a CI/CD pipeline. It is about embracing the technical and cultural practices that enable the smooth flow of small batches of work from development to operations, getting continuous feedback across the delivery pipeline, including from operations, and continually improving the process and the product based on feedback.
The mythical DevOps engineers: This antipattern is widely prevalent and perhaps the most stressful for the unlucky person. Instead of the entire organization owning the improvement of software delivery performance, a person is responsible for it. Predictably, this doesn’t work. Instead of DevOps breaking silos, organizations create another silo and a bottleneck – the stressed-out DevOps engineer.”
Product management consulting services
Happy to inform that our team received the formal DASA (DevOps Agile Skills Association) accreditation for Product management consulting services.
Reach us directly to improve your team productivity and effectiveness!
New types of competency profile to boost your careers
I -, Dash, T- competency profiles became very popular for the last 5-7 years due to their value in Agile teams forming, and also building career tracks for professionals in the VUCA world.
AXELOS – the leading methodological vendor for ITIL, PRONCE, MoR and other popular methodologies and frameworks – presented its extended concept for teams and team members on emergent areas and markets.
Below is an excerpt of this article about newly designed M-, E-, ans X- shaped competency profiles.
“M-shaped people have evolved from being Pi-shaped into those who possess multiple specialties (the vertical part of the M). From a resource management perspective, a person with one or more specialties are more adaptable than someone with a single speciality (I-shaped person) or even Pi-shaped. As such, each additional speciality changes the letter “M” to a comb. That is, where a person possesses more than three specialties to resemble a comb shape.
E-shaped is a new paradigm shift, where people actively demonstrate a combination of four characteristics – Experience, Expertise, Exploration and Execution to form the letter E. E-shaped people who demonstrate the breadth and depth of knowledge have expanded their knowledge to include tangible (execution i.e. proven ability to deliver) and intangible (exploration i.e. proven ability towards continuous improvement) specialities. This implies the person has both vision and granular detail to make a discernible difference to the organization reminiscent of being a best practice practitioner in whatever domain or competency.
X-shaped people have a higher degree of self-awareness, adaptive capacity and the competencies to thrive in the future. Similar to the self-actualisation in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, this employee type refers to the pinnacle of individual capability and competency. That is, X-shaped people demonstrate uniquely human skills that are grounded in empathy and purpose. They move from domains of knowledge to a constant state of learning, continually adapting to the environment. People with X-shaped skills have deep expertise in specialities (or knowledge area) as well as strong leadership skills and credibility.”
Managing volunteers in startup projects
Involving volunteers is a winning strategy for a startup. But a big question arises – what are specific management and motivation activities for volunteers’.
First, the basic recommendation is that you manage volunteers as employees. If a volunteer takes responsibility for a project (its part) she or he is responsible
Second, motivate with giving transparent perspective of the project and potential volunteer’s involvement. It helps a volunteer to align his/her plans with your project. And for startup founders it provides more predictability – if a volunteer goes to leave a project he/she can notify in advance.
Third, agree on schedule in advance, at least a month ahead. For example, a volunteer is ready to be involved 10 hours per week.
Supporting Next-Generation Entrepreneurs
G-Accelerator is one of the next generation accelerators, which combines the incubator and accelerator studies for students’ and alumni’s startups.
Read the full AACSB article, how does it work.
And learn about 6 principles of selecting a startup with a good potential:
- potential (20 percent),
- innovativeness (25 percent),
- possibility of creating triple impact (25 percent),
- scalability (20 percent),
- strength of the team (5 percent),
- and achievement (5 percent).
G-Accelerator demo day!
Calling all entrepreneurial minds! Only 3 days left till this year’s biggest G-Accelerator event: DEMO DAY 2021!
Join us online, live, on Wednesday April 14th, to see which 2 of our residential projects will deliver the best pitch and win the investment funding from Spain’s biggest market leaders!
Event is OPEN FOR ALL to attend.
Register now on https://bit.ly/3sYoThU
Software requirements specification
Take premium course for IT developers: Software requirements specification.
Microsoft is launching a global skills initiative
Microsoft is launching a global skills initiative aimed at bringing more digital skills to 25 million people worldwide by the end of the year. This initiative will bring together every part of our company, combining existing and new resources from LinkedIn, GitHub, and Microsoft. It will be grounded in three areas of activity:
(1) The use of data to identify in-demand jobs and the skills needed to fill them;
(2) Free access to learning paths and content to help people develop the skills these positions require;
(3) Low-cost certifications and free job-seeking tools to help people who develop these skills pursue new jobs.
At its heart, this is a comprehensive technology initiative that will build on data and digital technology. It starts with data on jobs and skills from the LinkedIn Economic Graph. It provides free access to content in LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, and the GitHub Learning Lab, and couples these with Microsoft Certifications and LinkedIn job seeking tools. In addition, Microsoft is backing the effort with $20 million in cash grants to help nonprofit organizations worldwide assist the people who need it most. One-quarter of this total, or $5 million, will be provided in cash grants to community-based nonprofit organizations that are led by and serve communities of color in the United States.
IT startup mentoring framework 