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Taking the ITIL v3 Managers bridge – some notes

Hopefully these notes will be useful for others; based on my experience of last weeks Bridging course and exam from The Art of Service in Brisbane.

The Curriculum

  • the curriculum is available from APM Group here
  • I didn’t see any surprises in the exam – i.e. everything in the exam was described in the curriculum
  • the focus of the exam is the differences from the ITIL v2 Managers exam.

Differences … but..

  • the bridge does assume that you understand the ITIL v2 space pretty well – i.e. your managers is still fresh!
  • you should read the five ITIL v3 books; there is a lot of contextual information that you really do need to understand.

After four days of cramming in Brisbane I ended up with five annoted ITIL books; five ‘books of notes’; each based on one of the phase books; a book of sample questions and exam-style questions; and finally a book of mind maps from The Art of Service.

For my own learning style the cross-referencing between the ‘bridge notes’ from The Art of Service and back to the books was really useful. It let me refer quickly from a concept – such as Portfolio Management, back to the relevent sections in the books.

Also useful is cross-referencing where the different roles and processes intersect. There is a lot of emphasis on the holistic lifecycle; also on the relationships between phases in the lifecycle. It’s not enough to try and map the v2 linear world onto the v3 map; I found it invaluable working with others to really understand the lifecycle and how it all fits.

Exam is done. Fingers crossed. Results in a week or so.

ITIL v3 Managers bridge

I’m in Brisbane – at the end of day one of my ITIL v3 Managers bridge course.

Phew. I’m tired. Just like the training for the v2 Managers Certificate last year (here, the exam here and results just before new year.)

The training and exam are for the ITIL v3 Managers Certificate. That gives me the ‘ITIL Expert’

The ‘ITIL Expert’ is the new description for the ITIL v3 Diploma; also an update on the Intermediate modules for the direct route – they are slowly being rolled out later this year and into 2009. I wouldn’t expect to see the Managing across Lifecycle until maybe March 2009.

The other interesting point is that the ‘Advanced Level’ in the diagram doesn’t exist yet.

ITIL v3 Foundation

I’m in Provo for a couple of days – sitting on an ITIL v3 Foundation course.

The main reason – it’s a cheap and convenient way to sit the exam..

I can’t sit the electronic exam at Prometric in Utah until the New Year. If I was in London I could do it today. Strange how electronically delivered tests take so long to roll out.

Buying ITIL books in London

As I was in central London I made a special visit to The Stationery Office Bookshop near Holborn.

TSO is a strange beast; formerly HMSO (Her Majestys Stationery Office), now the Office of Public Sector Information – it is the official publishing arm for the UK Government. Everything from Government papers, reports of debates in Parliament to ITIL, Prince and other documents are published.

The TSO bookshop is a veritable hideout of really specialist, non-overlapping information.

I was buying books on ITIL – the IT Infrastructure Library – for my team. Useful and required reading in todays IT world.

Business value of a CMDB

Nice article this month from Line56.com – about the business value of a CMDB.

It’s by the ex CTO of Marimba – who is now CTO of the Change and Configuration Management space at BMC – Kia Behnia.

I’d expect BMC to push a CMDB message – they after all message ITIL heavily and have a CMDB product.

The nice piece about this article is the real difference ‘process’ and ‘best practices’ can bring – regardless of your management technology.

The other truth is that a single repository as a CMDB is unworkable – a ‘meta-CMDB’ or ‘virtual-CMDB’ is far more realistic. Kia refers to federated CMDB:

However, not all management data related to configuration items are appropriate for storage in the CMDB. This is why organizations should consider a CMDB based on a federated data model. Why? Just like links within the general ledger to financial details stored in the accounts receivable system, a federated CMDB links to IT details. For example, a federated approach allows for other useful management information — such as service level agreements, purchase orders, incident and problem tickets, performance and utilization data–to be linked to the configuration items within the CMDB.