Hi, all!
I hope this blog finds you all well.
2019 had me very busy with me learning as much as I could about ITIL 4 so I can get ready to record some videos for you all! Over the last year I attended two fantastic Train the Trainer sessions in Washington DC with 15 other hand-picked instructors and consultants, and we all learned about the latest ITIL 4 developments. I’d like to share some of them with you!
Axelos (the publisher of ITIL) has decided to take a very Agile approach to ITIL 4, by releasing it in small chunks, as opposed to releasing the whole suite of books and knowledge at once. Back with ITIL V3, they released all five ITIL books at once, and ITIL Foundation classes summarized those books. But with ITIL 4, they’re releasing pieces incrementally, which has proved confusing for instructors and students alike… because when students have questions, the answer is sometimes “We don’t know yet, that part of ITIL 4 hasn’t been written yet.”
Axelos has also chosen to make changes to ITIL 4 incrementally as well.
On one hand, I love the idea of small, incremental changes, because that means ITIL 4 will stay up to date, and we won’t have to wait years for the ITIL guidance to reflect what is going on in the real world. On the other hand, small incremental changes means we’re always tweaking the courseware, making sure that students have the latest vocabulary and guidance so they can be successful on the exam.
For example: I own a hard-copy “OG edition” of the official ITIL 4 Foundation publication which was published in February 2019. In there (and on my ITIL Foundation Exam that I took last year) they talk about a practice called “Change Control” (which in prior versions of ITIL used to be “Change Management”). However, I just learned last month that the name of the practice is soon going to change to “Change Enablement,” because “Change Control” was confusing for certain parts of the world because it didn’t translate well. Don’t get me wrong: I LOVE the idea of making ITIL more accessible and understandable as possible, regardless of what flavor of English you speak. But this ITIL 4 Foundation book I purchased not even a year ago, is now out of date.
But that’s OK– because not many people really need a hard copy of a publication any longer. In fact, Axelos is strongly encouraging people to purchase a subscription to the ITIL 4 publications so this way you will always have access to them wherever you have an internet connection, and the books will always be guaranteed to the most current. Love it!
Anyway, I hope you’re all checking out ITIL 4 and starting to get familiar with it. And once this pandemic chills out a bit, we’ll be ready to get back into the classroom and get you all educated and certified. Yaaay!
