Review of GitLab's 'TeamOps Certification' course

Introduction¶

A little over two years ago, I took GitLab's course on how to manage a remote team. That was a very useful course and I was able to apply several best practices from that course to my role at the time, plus roles I've held since then. I continue to manage global and remote teams, so I was excited to hear about GitLab's newest course covering their "TeamOps" model of improving teams.

This course is hosted on LevelUp, and is one of 9 public course they have available right now.

Course Overview¶

The TeamOps Certification course is split into 5 sections and covers about 2-3 hours of material.

• The first section covers the foundations of TeamOps
• The remaining four sections cover the 4 guiding principles of TeamOps
  • Shared Reality
  • Everyone Contributes
  • Decision Velocity
  • Measurement Clarity

Except for the welcome message in the first lesson, this course is entirely text based. I was surprised by this because of the previous course from GitLab and the extensive use of video on how to manage a remote team. This course does have a 6-7 question knowledge check at the end of each section and will not let you proceed if you score below an 80%.

Fortunately, the questions are easy - assuming you comprehend what you are reading and not just clicking through to the next page. The course also provides access to the updated The Remote Playbook, which is a great starting point for checking your company's remote processes.

TeamOps felt like a good extension and refresher from the "How to Manage a Remote Team" course. Unfortunately, that's all it felt like - a refresher.

Conclusion¶

The change from video to text based courses was surprising, and slightly unwelcome. The content of the course is good, and will definately help teams improve how they operate. However, many of the same ideas were covered in the previous course. I suppose that if this continues to work for GitLab, it makes sense that they aren't trying to make sweeping changes, but I was hoping for...more, I suppose.

I recommend this course to anyone who manages a team remotely and needs a refresher from the previous course GitLab provided or doesn't have the recommended 11 hours for that course. This should take about an hour and a half to read through. If, however, you have more time I think the "How to Manage a Remote Team" course course has even more information that will be helpful.