ISO 20000 update

I was reading about the new ISO 20000 Foundation course that is being
offered by the ISEB (Information Systems Examination Board), a
department of the British Computer Society (BCS).

The ISO 20000 course from ISEB includes a comment that the three day ISEB ISO 20000 course is not a substitute for the itSMF 3 day Consultant course.

What is clear is that the consumer has another choice for ISO 20000 certification. What is also clear is that EXIN still has the most comprehensive ISO 20000 certification path AND they have their ISO 20000 exam available at Prometric (which itSMF and ISEB do not).

Competition is healthy in this market and from an initial start where there was only one option, IT folk now have a choice of three (for the record I am ISO 20000 Consultant certified).

ITIL Complementary Guidance - status update

When ITIL v3 was still in its infancy we learnt about the 3 aspects. The Core, the Web and the Complementary Guidance.

The complementary guidance being targetted towards ITSM practices in specific business sectors and technologies.

Has anyone seen any evidence of this? I haven't and the only mention I have seen seems to indicate that we'll simply get to see old titles with a new cover.

Perhaps that is reasonable given that a lot of what is in ITIL v3 is also material that already existed as part of v2 (but noone ever read).

I will stand corrected on this point, but I have not seen anything that delivers any Complementary guidance, only the standard marketing messages about what it is and how good it will be.

Waiting, waiting, waiting...

Just when you thought it was safe.... New ITIL exams

The latest set of draft syllabus for the ITIL v3 Intermediate courses have been published by APMG.

You may have heard that the Intermediate courses which encompass the five Service Lifecycle, four Service Capability and Managing Across the Lifecycle courses will be released in two waves.

Wave 1 - October 1st 2008 sees exams available to the public for Service Transition, Service Operation, Release, Control and Validation, Operational Support and Analysis and Service Offerings and Agreements.

Having seen the syllabi I can report that there are some changes from the draft syllabi that were produced several weeks ago. The most notable and probably of greatest interest is the exam format in all of the courses.

8 multiple choice questions !

So you are thinking that can't be too bad; but if you consider that the exam is 90 minutes long you get the idea that these are not simple questions.

In fact the questions are scenario based, each with 4 possible answers and (get this) there are varying degrees of "correctness" for each of the 4 answers. Correct, no longer is one question right and the others wrong. Now there is a really right one that is worth 5 marks, a not quite so right one that is worth 3 marks, a answer that earns 1 mark and a "distracter" worth 0.

Love it or hate it, the pass mark for the exam is 65% or 26 marks out of a possible 40 marks. You can earn yourself a distinction by getting 30 marks (75%).

So that is the breaking news on the new exam format for ITIL v3 Intermediate courses.

Personally, the format does not appeal to me. Having a gradient scoring system is very subjective. In real life there are multiple ways to achieve a result, so in this regard it makes sense to have different "correct" answers. However, my view of what is the right way to deal with a situation will be different from someone else and the choice is dependant on many more factors than can be documented in an exam (e.g. emotions, experiences).