As a refresher, ITIL V3 was born in 2007, and was a series of five books– each book describing a step in the ITIL V3 “Service Lifecycle:” Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, . . .
→ Click to Read More of this Post: Goodnight, ITIL V3.]]> Well, it’s time to say goodnight to another trusty version of ITIL: This time it’s ITIL V3 (a.k.a. ITIL V3/2011, ITIL 2011, etc etc etc.).

As a refresher, ITIL V3 was born in 2007, and was a series of five books– each book describing a step in the ITIL V3 “Service Lifecycle:” Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation, and Continual Service Improvement. In 2011 those five books got a little facelift and some botox, but stayed basically the same. Many organizations invested a lot of time, money, and effort into ITIL V3 training and coaching, aligning their organizations for V3 success.

ITIL 4 was launched in February 2019, and now that it’s been out for a few years, is currently a series of six books. ITIL Foundation: ITIL 4 Edition, Create, Deliver and Support (CDS), Drive Stakeholder Value (DSV), High Velocity IT (HVIT), Direct, Plan and Improve (DPI), and Digital and IT Strategy (DITS). Each book has an accompanying class by the same name that teaches the concepts and skills inside. What makes ITIL 4 neat is that there’s a story about an imaginary car rental company that weaves through all of the books, letting readers easily apply the ITIL concepts to a very accessible, real-world business situation. I love this new addition to the books!

Now that ITIL 4 is here, does this mean that you toss out all of your ITIL V3 knowledge? Was your investment wasted? Absolutely not! ITIL 4 builds on ITIL V3 (which builds on ITIL V2), so prior investments are always useful in the current landscape. ITIL 4 is all about flexibility, and incorporating your current ways of working with some new ideas, and crafting a solution that works for your organization… whether the “organization” we’re talking about is your entire corporation, your building, an individual product team, or your small workgroup. And what’s cooler: ITIL 4 isn’t just for IT anymore… because let’s face it; IT isn’t just for IT anymore. Can you think of anything in your world that isn’t IT-enabled? Nope. So ITIL applies to everything.

So let’s talk about how we can make ITIL 4 work for you, and where you can find some good training.

@Knapp_IT Wondering when the online training on ITIL V4 would come up. Please let the community know. #ITILV4

— Akanksha Shrivastava (@Aks_Sh) July 25, 2020

And here is the news I had to report back via Twitter:

Sadly, I'm unable to offer ITIL4 training videos; . . .
→ Click to Read More of this Post: The sad, final word about my ITIL 4 videos. :-(]]> A few days ago I received this tweet:

@Knapp_IT Wondering when the online training on ITIL V4 would come up. Please let the community know. #ITILV4

— Akanksha Shrivastava (@Aks_Sh) July 25, 2020

And here is the news I had to report back via Twitter:

Sadly, I'm unable to offer ITIL4 training videos; it's hugely disappointing for me & my 1000s of loyal video students. @AXELOS_GBP implemented a rule requiring all training (even videos) to include an exam; but our video resellers (where you'd get the videos) can't sell exams.

— Jill Knapp (ITIL® and stuff) (@Knapp_IT) July 25, 2020

Axelos' rule (requiring all training to include exams) is a well-meaning rule that is great for the ITIL community, but sadly it impacts me very directly. Our video resellers are simply resellers; there's no simple way to accredit a streaming platform to sell exams.

— Jill Knapp (ITIL® and stuff) (@Knapp_IT) July 25, 2020

Until we can figure that out (and my video publisher @PearsonITCert has been trying for a very long time), I am unfortunately dead in the water.

We naturally want to do everything legally and in full compliance; there's just no way to accommodate our unique video situation.☹️

— Jill Knapp (ITIL® and stuff) (@Knapp_IT) July 25, 2020

And she kindly replied:

Oops! Thank you for letting me know and allowing my hope to stay up still. I hope everything works out soon for the all of us.

— Akanksha Shrivastava (@Aks_Sh) July 26, 2020

So, in case it wasn’t clear, here’s a bit more detail and some backstory:

Over the last few years, we ITIL trainers noticed there were a lot of fake ITIL training companies popping up online. They would offer ITIL Foundation training at ridiculously low prices, and unfortunately the trainers were awful. These fake companies would charge bargain rates, and budget-conscious students would take these bogus classes because it looked like a great deal, and they’d naturally flunk the exam. It was a huge problem, and it needed to be fixed. It was giving ITIL a bad name.

Axelos (the ITIL mothership) decided to fix this by implementing a well-meaning rule in November of 2019 that said (I’m paraphrasing) “All ITIL training, whether it’s in-person, on-line virtual training, or even self-paced streaming videos, must be sold with an exam (or an exam voucher).”

Here’s the deal though: Only companies that have gone through the rigorous (and expensive) process of earning “Accredited Training Organization” (ATO) status is allowed to sell exams and exam vouchers. Since these scammer training companies weren’t about to go legit, Axelos was able to shut the scammers down, and students were now guaranteed that they were spending their training dollars on an Accredited Training Organization (ATO).

So what does this have to do with my ITIL 4 videos?

Well, there’s a 95% chance you watched my previous videos on either SafariBooksOnline or OReilly.com. The thing is, Safari and OReilly aren’t ATOs, so they’re not allowed to sell ITIL 4 training videos, because they don’t have a way to sell you an exam… because only ATOs can sell exams.

Now, 5% of you watched my videos on the PearsonITCertification website. Pearson is my publisher, and they actually are an ATO, and they have the ability to sell vouchers! WHEEEE! So now you might be thinking, “Great! So why don’t we all just buy the videos and the exam voucher from PearsonITCertification.com? That’s perfect!” And the reason is, not enough people think to go there for video training. If only 5% of the people who bought my videos bought them from Pearson, that means we have to somehow market to 95% of the universe to get the word out. Pearson doesn’t believe that the amount of money we’d have to spend on marketing to get those 95% of people to buy the videos from Pearson would make the investment worth it. So here we are.

So what was actually a very well-meaning rule by Axelos, intended to shut down scam training companies and direct students towards the companies who invested in becoming ATOs because ITIL training is part of their core business… companies like Pink Elephant, or ITSM Academy, New Horizons, or Qual-IT/Knapp-IT, etc…. has wound up hurting little guys like me. I have no way to sell you videos through Safari/OReilly.

It stinks, but I doubt it was intentional.

So, until Axelos changes their mind, there’s no way to provide streaming videos through Safari / O’Reilly. And I absolutely want to comply (and must comply) with their rules. They’re good rules.

If anything changes, I’ll let you know. Until then, I will focus on consulting, and providing training as a subcontractor for other ATOs.

And now you know the rest of the story!

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 . . .
→ Click to Read More of this Post: The Latest with ITIL 4]]> 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!

I was lucky enough to be invited to attend Axelos’ ITIL 4 Train the Trainer session in Washington DC in November 2018. Hundreds of instructors applied to attend, and only about 100 were actually accepted across a few sessions worldwide. I feel . . .
→ Click to Read More of this Post: ITIL 4 Foundation: Train the Trainer]]>

Flippin’ the IV: November 2018, Washington DC. Axelos ITIL 4 Foundation Train the Trainer Session

I was lucky enough to be invited to attend Axelos’ ITIL 4 Train the Trainer session in Washington DC in November 2018. Hundreds of instructors applied to attend, and only about 100 were actually accepted across a few sessions worldwide. I feel very, VERY lucky to have been chosen. I think the only reason I was chosen was because of my ITIL Foundation LiveLessons product has done so well (thanks to many of you all! <3), and they knew I’d be wanting to create new courseware and hopefully another set of LiveLesson videos for ITIL 4.

The goal of these Train the Trainer sessions was simply to learn the differences between ITIL V3/2011 and ITIL 4. It wasn’t a full-blown ITIL 4 Foundation class, it was a “What’s different, let’s make sure you instructors understand it right here from the horse’s mouth, let’s all figure out together how you’ll teach these new concepts to your students, and let’s all take the official ITIL 4 Foundation Exam so we can be certified ahead of everyone else, and so we can give exam feedback to James The Official Axelos Exam Creator Guy.” It was a ridiculously helpful two days!

The absolutely magical Donna Knapp from ITSM Academy taught the class, and she did a spectacular job. (That’s her, on the right side of the photo.) It was so great to finally meet her in person! I’ve known about her for well over a decade, and I lost counting the number of people who ask me if we’re related. For the record, Donna and I aren’t related, though I wish we were because I admire her to the moon and back!

Before the session, we attendees were sent a final draft edition of the ITIL 4 Foundation book. We knew it wasn’t the official version, but it’s what existed at the time in November 2018. (The good news is that it was very, very close to the official version out now.)

We were all instructed to read it before class, and I dutifully did.

What I Like About the ITIL 4 Foundation Book

What I like most about it is its readability. It’s easy read and understand, and there is a little story that flows through the entire book making the concepts easier to grasp because you get to know each of the characters, their roles, and how these ITIL terms and practices relate to them.

It’s not a terribly huge book, either. It’s not intimidating.

I also admire the heck out of the authors… the team of writers responsible for this thing are some of the industry’s most important (and not to mention some of my favorite) ITSM thought leaders.

Some of the changes to the framework, what little we know about it since this is just a Foundation book, are really logical. They got rid of ITIL processes and functions and now call them all practices. How many times did we have to drill into students’ heads that “The Service Desk is the FUNCTION that does the Incident Management PROCESS.” So we don’t have to worry about that anymore.

Back in ITIL V2/V3/2011 we learned that a PROCESS is a step of steps for getting something done (for turning inputs into outputs). And ITIL 2011 had 26 processes. Like, the process steps for Incident Management are in order and make logical sense… you can’t categorize an incident until you log it, theoretically. But can anyone tell me the steps, in order, of the Information Security Management process, or the Availability Management process? Nope… because there aren’t really any super-specific steps, it’s just something you kinda do. So ITIL 4 gets rid of the word “process” in that sense and replaces it with “practice,” so you’d have an Availability Management practice. Aaaaah, much better.

It’s also nice to see ITIL aligning with DevOps and Agile, because every time I teach a class with anyone younger than 55 in it, everyone argues with me about Change Management and Release and Deployment Management, and how people can’t seem to get anything done without Change Management authorizing everything every step of the way. Now of course, ITIL is and has always been “just a framework,” meant to be adopted, adapted, and even ignored when necessary, but students eager to pass a test really stressed out about that. So it’s nice to see that.

What don’t I like about it?

It is super-confusing to me that a book called “ITIL 4 Foundation” can exist without any other ITIL 4 books. Like, what is ITIL 4 Foundation, um, founded on? It seems really premature. It’s like we’re just watching the movie preview even though there’s no actual movie yet.

I also wish that things had different names, because so many of the names and terms are confusing, especially to someone new.

The Service Value System, the Service Value Chain, and Service Value Streams are three very different things. Service Relationship Management and Relationship Management are two very very different things.

The activities of the Service Value Chain aren’t explained well to me, and no matter how many times I ask for clarification, nobody can clarify it for me… specifically the definition of the “Build/Obtain” piece. In Jill-language, this is the value-chain activity where we buy something or build something. Customer needs a new application? Okay great, let’s decide if we should buy it or build it. Awesome. Makes sense. “All new resources are obtained through the obtain/build activity.” Sweet. Makes perfect sense. But the ITIL definition is “The purpose of the obtain/build value chain activity is to ensure that service components are available when and where they are needed, and meet agreed specifications.” How on earth do you get “buy or build” outta that? And no matter how many times I ask, nobody can explain it to me. So I recognize I might be stupid here, and that I just need to accept it and memorize it and shut up about it. But MAN, do I hate not understanding something in my bones, especially when I have to teach it. Because what if one of my students needs clarification? I’ll be stuck.

What did I think of the ITIL 4 Foundation exam?

I felt like it was a very fair exam.

It was really, really cool and very helpful having James The Official Axelos Exam Creator Guy(“TOAECG” – haha) attend our sessions, so we could not only give him feedback on the actual ITIL 4 Foundation book itself, but so we could give him feedback on the Foundation Exam Syllabus and whether we thought we could teach it all in the recommended 12 contact hours. We were also able to give him feedback on the sample exams, as well as feedback on the real exam. We felt very heard, which we all appreciated so much.

One interesting thing that James The Official Axelos Exam Creator Guy told us is that on the new ITIL 4 Foundation exams, every single possible answer will be something real from ITIL 4. For example, in ITIL 2011 exams, you could get a question like,

“Which ITIL core publication would focus on the diagnosis of problems and identifying root causes?”
and the possible answers would be:
(A) Service Strategy
(B) Service Chewbaccas
(C) Service Operation
(D) Service Spam Spam Eggs and Spam

The correct answer is obviously (D) (C) Service Operation, but you’ll notice that answers (B) and (D) are totally made up things and completely unrelated to ITIL. My examples are silly, but on the real exams of the past, sometimes using totally fake (but plausible-sounding) answers was just cruel.

In the ITIL 4 Foundation exams, all possible answers will be real, actual ITIL 4 things; there won’t be any made-up terms. I appreciate that. We all thanked James TOAECG very much for that.

Was it an easy exam? Nope. Was it the hardest thing I had ever done? Nope. Was I glad I studied? ABSOLUTELY, and that’s coming from me, someone who has written books on this stuff.

If you’re an ITIL V3/2011 ITIL Expert, you can probably pass the ITIL 4 exam just based on your old V3/2011 skills and your smarts. If you’ve only got your ITIL V3/2011 Foundation cert and you took that class/exam a few years ago, then I wouldn’t take the exam lightly.

Personally: I read the entire ITIL 4 Foundation core book, I sat in an intensive two-day session filled with fellow ITIL Experts, and I studied my face off, and I got a 37/40. (I’m not going to lie and tell you I got 100%; I didn’t.) But I was pretty surprised I did that well– I did not feel very confident coming out of the exam session. So when it comes time for you to take the class and take the exam (I would wait until 2020, honestly), TAKE YOUR TIME. I surprised myself, but I was the last one of my whole class to finish my exam. It was tricky, for sure.

“So Jill! When will your ITIL 4 Foundation LiveLessons videos and study materials coming out?”

Not for a while. First off, ITIL 4 isn’t even out yet, though it will be any day now.

But besides that, I am a firm believer in “Never install a new operating system until at least one service pack comes out.” That same logic applies to ITIL and courseware, and especially applies to something like LiveLessons Videos that have to be as perfect as possible the day I create them, because making updates to them is nearly impossible.

So I want to wait until ITIL 4 Foundation has been out for a good while, and for the exams to have a chance to settle down a bit and get the bugs worked out, and to give myself time to get used to teaching it in the real world. I want to make sure my real-life students have solid pass-rates, and that I feel like I’m setting students up for success with my teaching methods, stories, and details. Like I always say when teaching 2011 Service Design: “You can’t rush awesome.”

When I created my ITIL 2011 Live Lessons videos in 2015, I had been teaching ITIL 2011 for a few years, so I was very comfortable with the material, I had my schpiel down, and there were very few do-overs. I want my ITIL 4 Foundation LiveLessons to be that effortless, and I’m sure you do, too. There’s no rush. Relax. You don’t win a medal or a monument if you’re the first person on your block to earn an ITIL 4 Foundation certificate.

Does that mean I’m going to wait 4 years before making the videos? Of course not! But I want to wait until I feel like I can make a really great product that is worthy of your time and money. Hopefully I’ll have something ready by the end of the year.

Until then, THERE’S NO NEED TO RUSH TO GET STARTED WITH ITIL 4 ON YOUR OWN. ITIL V3/2011 IS NOT GOING ANYWHERE, AND ALL ITIL V3/2011 PRACTITIONER and INTERMEDIATE CLASSES ARE ALL USEFUL AND FULLY TRANSFERABLE IN THE ITIL 4 SCHEME!

ITIL V3/2011 ISN’T GOING ANYWHERE UNTIL AT LEAST Q3 2020! YOU HAVE TIME!

ALL CAPS! ALL CAPS! DILUTE! DILUTE! OK! :-D

So with that, sit tight, and let’s take this ITIL 4 journey together. Patience, Grasshopper.

Thanks for reading!

Jill

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog, but there hasn’t really been much going on to report… until now!

A few months ago at the itSMF Fusion 2017 conference this past November, Axelos announced that ITIL will be updated in 2018. (Watch a video of the announcement here!) This is great news, because as an . . .
→ Click to Read More of this Post: Have you heard the news? ITIL 4 is on the way in 2019!]]> Hi, all!

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog, but there hasn’t really been much going on to report… until now!

A few months ago at the itSMF Fusion 2017 conference this past November, Axelos announced that ITIL will be updated in 2018. (Watch a video of the announcement here!) This is great news, because as an instructor, consultant, and practitioner, I’ve been feeling that some parts of the framework needed a nudge to be more current.

Here’s what we know so far:

You can read the official announcement and learn more on Axelos’ website.

I’m sure you’re all dying to know if I’m going to create new videos for the new edition of ITIL… and that answer is “Of course!” But I imagine those videos won’t be recorded for a good while. The new edition of ITIL is coming out sometime in 2019, and the exams probably won’t be ready until mid-2019 (I’m guessing, here). So it’d be silly for me to record videos until the new exams come out and settle down a bit. But keep your eyes peeled here and I’ll keep you updated.

I sure am excited about the ITIL update. How about you?