Survey of the benefits derived from ITSM professional certification
Ever wonder about the benefits derived from ITSM professional certification? Zip over to ITSM Portal and answer their 5 minute survey - they'll send you the results. "Participate in this survey and find out the net effects of ITIL certification! ". Actually it's ITPreneurs' survey but I found it on ITSM Portal, always a great source of ITSM news.
Made in New Zealand 
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sat the test... it got weird
The survey gets a bit weird in the middle.
Question: Many ITIL certified people state that the intensive training program and achieving certification resulted in life-changing experiences. Describe in one sentence how you feel the certification has changed your life?
My Answer: You have to be kidding! ITIL certification did not change my life. Getting married and starting a family was life-changing.
Who are these "many people" who found ITIL certification life-changing? What were they adding to their water? What sort of life did they have before doing 3-12 days training? That's one of the most blatantly self-serving survey questions I've seen in ages.
Once upon a time
You know that used to be true. In the early years of V1 the ITIL training was extremely intense and experiential. At Sunningdale we ran syndicate exercises and case studies until late in the evening. In the second week that often extended to the early hours of the morning.
And it did, I hope, transform some people. We had tears and tantrums but we also had people who experienced a real "eye-opener" experience. We had techies, project managers and even CIO's who realized the error of their ways, we had service desk agents who realized that what they had to say was really important. We had people who seized on the course as their first exposure to a range of management techniques. Some of the people Ivor, Mike, Bryan, and I trained in those days have gone on to be significant players in the ITSM market.
Meanwhile this week I'm on my v3 manager's bridge course. The tutor is great - David Harris of FGI who is moving to Canada soon if anyone in Toronto needs to employ a good ITIL trainer - but exciting and li8fe changing it isn't.
cult programming
yes every cult brain-programmer knows the importance of fatigue, isolation, repetition, authoritative dogma, and group-think
Deprogramming
And that is why the courses were so tough - to de program them from the cult of IT Knows Best, where they were tired o fconstant fire fighting, isolated from real people, always seeing the same mistakes time after time, subjected to the constant dogma that technology would fix the issues, and united in the group think that users are the lowest form of life.
Which is why the training used to provide: excitement, exposure to other people with the same problems, a novel way of thinking about those problems, involvement in debate about the best solutions, and ...well OK we had to provide enough group think to get them through the exam, but we didn't see passing the exam as the prime purpose of the course. I suspect the change of emphasis does tend to introduce more repetition, dogma and group think. I might argue that actually the biggest challenge and responsibility facing any tutor is getting the right balance between facts and opinions about facts. People need to know how to recognize a black swan when they see one for the first time, and also how to react to it in terms of rethinking their world view.
J
seen God
sorry i was rushing to get to conference. yeah I got a laugh out of that one too. I answered "not at all". Maybe we should have a survey on how many trainees have seen God during an ITIL course?