What About It Service Management Training Accredited ?
Q: what about It Service Management Training Accredited ? Which course did you go on? one of the HDI / itSFM courses? How do you think it compares with the stuff from BECTa (ie FITS on the Tech
Support Advisory Service)?
A:The trouble with ITIL as it stands at the moment (unless its changed in
the last 6 months) is that it's an 'old boys club' (sort of) when it
comes to who can deliver the courses and it also suffers from the way
that the certifications are arranged - you either have to have an
approved invigilator come to hold the exams or you attend an authorised
testing site. You cannot self-study or arrange your own training and
then take the exams as your course has to be held by an approved trainer
too.
Fair enough, it maintains standards but it also keeps the cost up -
which is fine if you are a corporate who wants to 'do ITIL', but as you
hint, the smaller outfits find it expensive.
A company for which I used to work had been working in the customer
service/help desk training and consultancy marketplaces for around 15
years and had also developed general and bespoke customer
service/management/service delivery courses for numerous other training
organisations and blue-chip companies - we approached the BCS/ISEB to be
accredited to run ITIL courses and also to have our own material
approved, but the hoops we were expected to jump through and the money
we were expected to pay for the privilege were crazy.
To cap it all, even though we could deliver the courses with our eyes
shut due to our industry experience, the timescale to be approved was
going on for 8+ months - mainly because we had to put at least one
trainer through all the relevant ITIL courses and some were not run that
regularly, plus the time taken for the powers-that-be to process all the
paperwork wasn't exactly speedy. The net result of all this was that
there were only a limited number of companies authorised to run ITIL
courses, they were expensive to use (supply/demand) and they were
overwhelmed with work and so their ability to run some courses in the
near future wasn't good.
In the end, we approached a number of the major ITIL authorised training
organisations (I seem to recall there were about 5 at the time) with a