The DevOps MBA Curriculum
The proliferation of MBA courses and the need for differentiation has led to specialised MBA courses that tend to combine classic business education with a focus on one particular area such as HR or Finance
The current trend is to follow the money and focus on contemporary subjects such as Analytics, Entrepreneurship or indeed Information Systems and Technology. The MBA industry is attempting to bridge the gap between business and technology. Demand for coding skills for business graduates is on the up, and the there are a lot of programmes focusing on big data and analytics.
Higher education and of course, Graduate Business education is being disrupted as much as the next industry. Massive Open Online Courses and the sheer readily available free and open information have set trends that alter the playing field for everyone involved.
We’ll avoid entering the debate on whether an MBA is worth pursuing. Nevertheless, books and projects such as The Personal MBA on No Pay MBA are certainly popular.
An MBA programme specialising in the DevOps (or BizDevOps or DevOps 2.0) thinking and approach of doing business, would need to dive into to run across a wide variety of subjects. That would be all business parts that could be permeated by the DevOps principles and ways, i.e. nearly everything.
Ultimately, the Technology and Business functions are becoming integrated, interwoven and indistinguishable from each other. This is what the DevOps MBA will be attempting to cover and elaborate on.
Bellow is a proposed DevOps focused MBA curriculum. It’s by no means exhaustive and comprehensive. It’s more of a brain dump, off the top of my head, about bits and pieces I’d like to touch upon in this series. More topics and ideas will most likely crop up along the way.
Organisational Theory & Behaviour
- Organisational Culture — how to foster collaboration and and experimentation
- Culture vs Strategy and vice versa
- Dynamic Learning Organisations
- Holacracy, Teal Organisations, Stigmergy and other emerging management models
- People Analytics/ Team Analytics
- The Decoded Company
Operations Management
- Value Stream Mapping and other Lean 6 Sigma tools
- Building efficient organisational feedback loops
- Performance Measurement & Management
Supply Chain Management
- Software Supply Chain Management
- Continuous Customer Value Creation
Digital Innovation, Transformation & Change
- The unbearable lightness of innovation
- Innovation is a game of numbers
- Leading the Transformation
Leadership
- What kind of leadership does BizDevOps need?
- CIO as Intrapreneur & VC
Finance
- Cloud Economics
- ROI of adopting DevOps, or can you afford not to?
- Net Present Value based decisions
Risk Management
- Antifragile
- Chaos Engineering
Strategy
- The elusive Product-Business Fit
- Strategy and Technology http://www.hbs.edu/coursecatalog/6208.html
- Designing Competitive Organisations
- Wardley Maps, Situational awareness, and Strategy definition.
Quality Management
- TDD approach to Business Models & Products/Services
- Automate the right things right.
Legal/Ethics
- Agile Contracts
- Ethical BizDevOps — what’s the state of tech&biz ethics today?
