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.