SMART-DEVOPS - DevOps competences for Smart Cities • ALL DIGITAL

18 Feb SMART-DEVOPS – DevOps competences for Smart Cities

18 Feb, 2019

Posted at 12:29h in Employability and Entrepreneurship, Past projects by Andrea Bedorin

Facebook @SmartDevOpsEU
Twitter @devops_smart

The DEVOPS project aimed at closing the gap between today’s and future’s skills demands of municipal workforce by emphasizing on the exploitation of emerging employment paradigms such as DevOps and had the ultimate goal to develop a job profile for Smart Cities DevOps professionals.

Smart-DevOps project addressed the shortage of digital and transferrable skills in the municipalities’ smart cities sector and supported this sector’s employees in their professional development. The obtained results are expected to benefit smart cities and municipalities which aim to adopt the DevOps culture, principles and practices by introducing DevOps professional profiles.

It is a Sector Skills Alliance where universities, VET providers, companies and national standardisation bodies came together to define and develop the skills needed in an emerging and very dynamic sector: Smart Cities.

It addressed those working on Smart City strategies and tools, i.e. ICT and technical staff in municipalities, and will apply the DevOps approach to their work.

WHAT IS DEVOPS?

DevOps is a compound of “development” and “operations”, and in software development it is methodology that combines the development phase (Dev) and the operations phase to shorten the development life cycle of a software product.

It established an agile and iterative approach where development and operations specialists work closely together since the beginning to continuously develop, deliver, test and improve the product.

WHAT IS SMART CITY?

There are many definitions of what a Smart City is, but we propose the following: “A smart city uses digital technology to connect, protect, and enhance the lives of citizens.”

Development and operation specialists that are behind the development of Smart Cities are: Technical staff, Managers, Support staff. With this project, we proposed a methodology for implementing the DevOps approach in Smart Cities.

PROJECT KEY ACTIONS

1. Map skills needs of smart cities Development and Operations professionals (ICT project managers, coders, technical writers, web-designers, system administrators, technicians, etc.) working in municipal ICT departments.
2. Design and deliver a VET curricula combining digital and transferrable skills, including a MOOC, open educational resources (OERs), e-learning, face-to-face training and work-based experience.
3. Pilot the developed curricula in Cyprus, Germany, Greece, and Italy and valuate the experience.
4. Disseminate and exploit the project results beyond the partnership.

IMPORTANT PROJECT FEATURES

- The project strengthened the collaboration between VET (vocational education and training) providers, municipalities and smart cities IT vendors.
- eCF (European e-Competence Framework) was used describe the profiles
- a mapping exercise to ESCO-ISCO08 has been done (European and International Standard Classifications of Occupations)
- EQAVET (the European Quality Assurance in Vocational Education and Training) has been used to ensure quality of training provision
- the project related to EQF / NQF (European and national qualifications frameworks) and ECVET (European credit system for vocational education and training) to facilitate mobility and recognition.

PROJECT OUTCOMES

Project deliverables – from mapping skills supply and demand; developing the MOOC and its courses; to final project outputs. Outputs are available either in English or also in other partner languages.
MOOC course: Become a DevOps Smart Cities Professional – the course was developed to take on this challenge and offer high quality educational course that will enable the participants to develop and acquire essential competencies needed to tackle the challenges of managing and evolving of smart cities.
Digital Open Educational Resources (OERs) – collection of module descriptions, knowledge domains, learning objectives, and handbooks for 40 competences covered in the MOOC.
Smart DevOps Community of Practice (CoP) – We established Smart DevOps Community of Practice in beginning of June 2021. In few weeks the CoP grew to over 100 members and has started to shape into a vibrant and knowledgeable community active on daily level. It is hosted in the framework of Smart DevOps Facebook page which makes it easily accessible and familiar in terms of how to use the platform.

PARTNERSHIP