Following on from the two previous articles, the attention has now turned to me, and my involvement with ITIL.
How did you get in to this ITIL lark?
My own specialism is Capacity Management. I was working for the UK’s leading software and consultancy firms in this area during the 1990s. At this time they were involved in the rewrite of the Capacity Management section of ITIL from version 1 to version 2. When I became a self-employed consultant in 1998 I found that many organisations had either just started implementing ITIL or had at least implemented the Incident and Change processes and were looking at Capacity as one of the next processes to put in place. I was in the right place at the right time.
Is it essential to be qualified?
The ITIL certification programme starts off with a “foundation” course and exam. This covers the fundamental aspects of every ITIL process and explains how they interlink with each other. Having this qualification (which only takes a couple of days) proves that you understand the basics of service management within the framework ITIL.
Version 2 of ITIL then allowed people to become experts, or “practitioners”, of a specific ITIL process or become a “Service Manager” capable of implementing all processes.
Version 3 has changed the qualification process so that having taken a foundation course the candidate then pursues a modular route of either “Lifecycle” or “Capability” processes that once completed follows to “expert” status and eventually “master”.
If one is responsible for implementing ITIL within an organisation then it is almost a fundamental requirement to be at the “expert” level. However, if one is focussing on a specific process then the new v3 qualification path does not provide a clearly identifiable qualification and therefore a combination of the “foundation” qualification and many years experience are typically sufficient to prove to a client that one is suitably skilled for a role.