A bit about ITIL

The company I work for creates software that help organizations with huge IT infrastructures manage their IT and tie it very strongly to their business needs.

As IT organizations grow mature and stressed to improve and bring more value for money, we see they tend to look for "best practices" for managing their IT business. ITIL is one of the sources they go to, so we decided to learn ITIL in order to "speak" the language our customers are speaking and understand the way they see their domain.

ITIL stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library. It is actually a collection of books, describing different aspects of managing an IT organization. It is organized into several parts, including:

• Service strategy - how to decide what services to provide to bring value to your customers
• Service design - how to design and implement the service
• Service transition - how to move the new or updated service from the lab to production
• Service operation - how to operate the service and support the users on an ongoing basis
• And...
• Continuous service improvement - how to keep improving these process and make them even better (maybe "bester"?)
  

BTW, "Best Practices" reminds me of dilbert, asking the pointed hair boss: if everybody is doing a "best practice", doesn't it become a "mediocre practice"?

I rather enjoyed the training - we had an excellent instructor with YEARS of tough industry experience, and excellent examples for everything.

To read more about ITIL go:
ITIL official site - http://www.itil-officialsite.com/AboutITIL/WhatisITIL.asp
Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Infrastructure_Library

ISTQB? Check. ITIL? Check

I am now ISTQB and ITIL foundation certified, and got an observation about these certifications. In both cases I studied and took the exam with people that are new to the field of IT and software testing. I saw that for the experienced pros, the study was focused on agreeing on words and terms to describe processes and objects they work with daily. These falks had a rather easy time when preparing and in the exam itself.

The other part of the crowd were inexperienced and tried to learn the glossaries by-heart, to memorize them the best they can for the exam. Some of them didn't manage to do so. I believe that learning glossaries by-heart, without an experience base to tie the concepts to is futile.

The test itself was hard for non-English speakers. It is a time-limited multiple-choice test, filled with semi-tricky questions. I happen to be quite good at this sort of tests, but others were dissapointed and said the ITIL test was "nasty".

Bottom-line: in the future, I will recommend 2 things to my team members and collegues:
1) go do the certification when you have enough experience to make it valuable
2) arrange study groups - this way you can share experience with others and enjoy the company while learning for the exams

P.S.
The ISTQB certification comes framed in a nice glass frame, looking very professional - a lot more "impressive" than the academic degree that took me years to complete. Feels more like PR than a certificate of acheivement...