ITIL Foundation Course?

[slloyd]

I'm looking to further my career in the field of IT and for the last 3 years now I have slowly began to remove myself from the Technical side of IT and become more into Management and Project Planning. Although I do like to keep my hand in...just my role now is split 60/40 but I feel like my technical gloves should be hung up and retired.

My question is, I don't have too deep pockets and wanted to know if I could study and pass the ITIL Foundation Course without the need of going on a 1-3 days course and where can I download all the required material to do so.

Thanks, Steve.

[timwilky]

It is a condition of employment in my company that everyone is ITIL foundation. OK the company paid for everyone to do it.

The exam is a b'stard. OK it is easy to pass, but bloody hard to get 100%. only 40 questions but you need to give the textbook answer. of the 300 of us in the UK. Only one got all 40. a couple got 39. I got 34 and I think the pass is 28. The only one who failed was the accounts clerk and all question why she had to do it.

Whilst in some ways it is teaching your granny to suck eggs. You have to use the right terminology. A server going down is not a problem. It is an incident etc. I think many IT companies now base themselves on ITIL practice. so having the foundation is no bad thing. But it should be as in my companies case for everyone. Business and project managers then need to be doing extra qual's such as service management etc.

Just doing a reading exercise will not pass the exam. You really do need the course

Currently studying for my ITIL Managers exam......end of April is the date

I would strongly suggest you do the 3 day course for the v3 Foundation. What you get out of the course is what you need to pass. If you are in the job then with some common sense you will get a good mark. Doesn't matter though.

Check some of the training companies as they do online courses and these cost less. If you need any help feel free to msg me.

+1 to above. Foundation level ITIL is easy, but the questions can be a bit stupid. It has a few questions that seem like trick questions, and a few where the answer is not what you expect because of the way you read the question. I commented afterwards that I didn't know if the exam was trying to test my knowledge of ITIL, or my ability to spot a trap, or ability to be extremely pedantic in my use of English.

It's the kind of course where you need to be trained to pass the exam, even if you could learn all the material perfectly satisfactorily for day to day use by yourself.

[steveg]

I had to do the ITIL foundation course , not hard just dull

Cheers Steveg

[slloyd]

Thanks folks for all your responses and guidance, and looks like I'll have to look around for a good training organisation within the M25 to get this underway. I don't want to ask my current company to foot the bill as I'll then be tied to the job with the qualification if I do pass - or would need to pay the cost back if I decided to leave.

Also on a side note is PRINCE2 worth taking?

Originally Posted by slloyd

and become more into Management and Project Planning.

Originally Posted by slloyd

Also on a side note is PRINCE2 worth taking?

Much more so than ITIL IMO, of course if you have both, better again.

[squirrel_hunter]

Originally Posted by slloyd

Also on a side note is PRINCE2 worth taking?

Stretchie has done some PRINCE2. We used the manual to spread the load of his Thundercat engine on the jack when we dropped it out the frame.

As for ITIL, I've not done it. However my former company sent a lot of the management on a course for it not so long ago. My Dev manager fired a load of the exam questions at me, and I got them all right apart from the ones that required the knowledge of the terminology used. I've never read a manual on it.

The thing with ITIL and PRINCE2 (or any other) methodologies is its all good to go on a course its another thing to actually use what has been learned. After all that ITIL covers the only difference that we made was the introduction of a more complicated and meaningless Change Control system and an introduction of a Change Advisory Board (don't get me started on this one). None of the project management techniques were ever implemented, it was as if ITIL never happened...

ITIL foundation very boring, but many places do require it.

Do some microsoft courses, we are now a Microsoft IT Academy!

Originally Posted by squirrel_hunter

The thing with ITIL and PRINCE2 (or any other) methodologies is its all good to go on a course its another thing to actually use what has been learned. After all that ITIL covers the only difference that we made was the introduction of a more complicated and meaningless Change Control system and an introduction of a Change Advisory Board (don't get me started on this one). None of the project management techniques were ever implemented, it was as if ITIL never happened...

Bet your place still advertises themselves as ITIL compliant when they are selling to customers though

Lots of places try to put in ITIL process and procedure and fail, either because they didn't understand what it was beforehand, or they tried to do it in prescriptive manner. It's a framework, a toolset, not a set of hard and fast rules, you draw from it what suits your business and provides a benefit. There's not point in putting in a procedure that becomes an obstruction to the way you do things, unless the way you do it already is causing you to fail. Same goes for PRINCE.

My career has mainly played out amongst the big outsource organisations such as Capgemini, there getting fairly close to ITIL is pretty essential with so many people and so many customers involved in a single support organisation. Your organisation needs to be pretty close to ITIL to achieve ISO27001 accreditation too, which a lot of the big tenders are now stating as a pre-requisite.