Pouring the Foundation: Adventures in ITIL Training

Last week I attended a three day training session in order to obtain my ITIL Foundations certification. Our CEO's commitment to ITIL includes a goal for every employee to achieve at least this level of certification. This includes marketing geeks like me and not just the usual breed of techie geeks.

Now I really didn't have the time for three days out of the office and away from home when I could have been blogging or flossing my teeth or something. I've read a tremendous amount of material on ITIL and written plenty so it was an interesting proposition to compare this tactical training with the high level look that I've had.


When I got to the classroom set up at the hotel, I immediately noted the Medieval Torture Chair that would be my home for the next three days. I had brought a back pillow but it was sadly ill matched.

The training consisted of part lecture and part simulation using a Formula 1 racing theme. The class was larger than typical and I was assigned to the equivalent of Level 2 support. Each time a car had a problem, the "service desk" sent us a ticket. Of the seven members on my team, only three were technical folks, the rest of us were marketing, sales or administrative types. To us a ticket is for a concert or for speeding. (Or in my case, speeding to a concert.)

The instructor explained that the game required Level 2 support to match the incident number to a piece of software or hardware on a gameboard and solve a puzzle. The example she gave was "what comes next...2,4,6,8,?" OK, we're good to go.

No ITIL, no Control
They're off to the races and it is chaos. Now in hindsight, it was supposed to be chaos because there were no processes or procedures and no change management in place. By that point, the Medieval Torture Chair was looking pretty inviting.

And those puzzles. I think the super smart lady in Parade Magazine, Marilyn Vos Savant (yeah, like that's her real name) designed these. After the instructor's example, I was expecting "Fill in the blank....Twinkle, Twinkle, Little ______"
Nooo, we had math puzzles and puzzles with dominos. Dominos? Unless there's a pizza involved, give me a different question. The puzzles with letters were expecially confusing. And the tickets came fast and furious. Who built these cars? Yugo?

Adding some control
Then we learned about Incident and Problem Management and developed simple processes for us to try again. By this time we had figured out that the letter puzzles corresponded to numbers. So you had to translate the letters to numbers, solve the number puzzle, translate back to letters, do the hokey-pokey and turn yourself around and then give your answer. I'm not sure what that taught me about ITIL but it did give me an appreciation for Tylenol. After five minutes I was hoping for a question along the lines of "What is the capital of Afghanistan?"

Making ITIL elements work together
By the final simulation, we were ready. . We had matched the car problems to applications on the gameboard, spent "money" on extra capacity for a key server, two railroads and Park Place and assigned an Incident Manager, Problem Manager, Change Manager, Configuration Manager and massage therapist. And I was off puzzle duty. The chair of Medieval Torture hadn't gotten any better but the cookies at lunch did. Things ran a little smoother and we scored better.


Did all of this help me pass the test? Hard to say, I think I would have gotten the same score by studying the materials, doing the practice exams and seeing my chiropractor. But the overall process gave me a greater appreciation of just how important processes and procedures are combined with best practices and all the elements of ITIL working together. Good Systems Practice is not just a nice brand that cost me $125/hour for a good trademark attorney. It is essential to control and prevent chaos, system failure and money loss.

Standardize the testing, please!
A sidenote to the certification bodies and my friends at itSMF. There are two certification tests; the one from the British group (ISEB) and the one from the Dutch group (EXIN). In addition to adding one more module, the EXIN test is deeper (in my opinion) and the sentence structure can be confusing. If we're looking to certify people in best practices, there shouldn't be such a discrepancy in the certification process.

The Marketing Maven

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