Continuous Delivery Architect – T-Shaped, PI-Shaped & COMB Skills Required!

Is your organization transforming with AGILE, ITSM, DevOps or LEAN and looking forward to optimizing a Continuous Delivery Pipeline?

Do you want to be a Continuous Delivery Architect?

This is an amazing and exciting time where you can dream and build upon what you have and develop the “COMB” shaped skills that will shape your future!

The “2019 Upskilling Report for Enterprise DevOps Skills” reinforces that organizations not only need “T” shaped skilled practitioners or even “PI” shaped skillsets. Many high-performing organizations are looking for individuals that have “COMB” shaped skillsets. An individual with “COMB” skills would have a broad base of knowledge forming the top of the comb and then also have multiple expertise areas which gives the shape of a comb. You can start developing your skillsets or those of your team to shape individual career opportunities and also to shape the future of your organization.

Expanding your skills is particularly needed for those involved in any way with DevOps and Continuous Delivery Pipelines. I suggest beginning with “T” shaped skills. This means you get a broad understanding of the business and the overall end-to-end Value Stream but also that you develop at least one very in-depth skill. This could be technical or other, but you would be an expert in at least one other needed skill set. Then move onto a “PI” shaped skill set where you would have that broad understanding of the end-to-end system but now have depth into two main areas. For example (Development and Security) might be your in-depth skills. And finally, now you are ready to look into how you could develop further for “COMB” shaped skills.

When a group of DevOps Foundation Certification candidates performing the needed instrumentation for things like micro-services, containers, and dates were asked “What do you think of when you hear the title “Continuous Delivery Architect? What is that role?”, most associated the role of defining the tooling and cloud services that would enable what they think of as a DevOps pipeline. Most associated with the design of this pipeline and in part, this is true.

In truth, a “Continuous Delivery Architect” (CDA) is a tool-agnostic individual who not only is engaged in the design but also must have a key role to play in the implementation and the management of the toolchains and ecosystems that support Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Testing and ultimately Continuous Deployment. In order to optimize the throughput, and ensure the speed to value a CDA should have an integral role and be involved in defining or integrating underpinning processes, metrics, APIs, and more. All of this while having a keen sense of cultural considerations makes The “Continuous Delivery Architect” role the key to the success of a DevOps Continuous Delivery Pipeline.

This is an amazing and exciting time where you can dream and build upon what you have and develop the “COMB” shaped skills that will shape your future!

ITSM Academy's CDA course in our virtual, instructor-led classroom is open for enrollment.

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