The Good Old ITIL V2 is dying – It’s ‘execution’ date is announced!

I thought good  practice schemes have a natural death – when newer, better practices comes to the foray, the older ones gracefully fade out.

I started my journey with ITIL in V2 and never cared to look at V1 as it was almost naturally taken over by V2. I am not sure (disclaimer) if there was a planned and executed end of V1 from the source – OGC or TSO

Yesterday the official press release from OGC announced the phased withdrawal plan for ITIL V2. Points worth a note are:

• The decision is based on a survey of around 1300 people in the industry.
• The Withdrawal will be complete on 30th June 2011  (Just wondering is it a mere coincidence that the ITIL V3 revision is also planned to complete just before that? May be I am reading too much into it)
• But wait, that withdrawal is with respect to the Publications (books) – though it “may be” made available later on a ‘print-on-demand’ basis.
• The certifications will be withdrawn earlier in phases:

V2 Foundation to cease 30 June 2010

V2 Manager to cease 31 August 2010

V2 Practitioner to cease 31 Dec 2010 

Foundation Bridge to cease 31 Dec 2010

After that only ‘re-sits’ will be allowed till 30th June 2011.

There are still some unanswered questions:

 

ITIL V3 – revision – OGC/TSO call for authors & reviewers

The stake holders world over have been debating the mandate from OGC to revise ITIL V3 core publications.

Now they have published a call for participants (authors and Reviewers) for the same. Here are some excerpts and a few observations/remarks:

• The objective of the ‘project’ is to address ‘issues’ and ‘inconsistencies’ in the current ITIL documentation. No new concepts will be added.
• The participants in the projects will be at three levels:
  • Author: One author per each of six books! (Even the ‘official introduction’ book is getting revised along with 5 core volumes).
  • Mentors: who will mentor the author – each of the mentor will have to be authors of current version.
  • Reviewers: Two levels of review – around 10 people will review the core volumes in stage 1 and around 15 in stage 2. There is an intent to ensure representation from different levels of organizations,while selecting reviewers.
• In the case of Authors – even though the service will be delivered by individuals – the contract has to be with a legal entity.

Please note that the role of ‘Author’ here is to correct the inconsistencies and issues as identified through the Change control log. So, I get a feeling it is more of a (probably ‘enhanced’) technical writer role than a real authorship. I could be wrong!

Also, one is not sure – the revised publication will have the original authors’ name + the revision author’s name in the list of ”Authors”.

And here comes the interesting part for most of us (who are not planning to become authors, mentors or reviewers):

 

ITIL dumbs…er…dumps!

If there is a state beyond ‘being fed up’, I have reached that, with the people asking for ITIL dumps!

Some people start with them wanting to understand ITIL, implement ITIL and all that preludes and end up ‘by the way, do you have any dumps that I can use?’

Some others are much more straight forward – ‘I am planning to take the exam this saturday; can you send me some dumps?’

I have learnt to ignore those questions on forums, yahoo groups etc long back, but when it is a direct attack on you, still can’t hide a visible frown on my face and a tinge of that in my voice (if it is over phone) – will get there soon! By the way I am much more tolerant towards people ask for ’sample question papers’! (just cosmetic change… but still).

Yeah, I am talking about Questions for ITIL foundation exams.

People are so used to certification exams and they depend and trust ‘dumbs, sorry… dumps’ much more than that a trainer, the official ITIL books or even themselves!

Nothing wrong at all - except that I am not clear what is the outcome they are expecting other than a paper certificate in hand! If that is it, why can’t they spare at least trainers like me who live in the passion of it (and of course, make a living out of it… it hurts…! lol)

Here are my few  tips to those who takes the web search engines and torrent sites upside-down looking for dumps: