Friday 24 January 2014

Quality over Quantity?

I returned from holidays last week and boldly started 2014 with a ‘polarising’ tweet:

OK, I'm back from holidays and have stepped into 2014.What's new? Has @AXELOS_GBP messed up #ITIL yet? #ITSM

Admittedly quite a blunt tweet, but I was hoping for some responses and got exactly what I bargained for with specifically two interesting ‘discussions’ following (using the term lightly as it was all in 140 character twitter statements, thus lacking some ‘finesse’).

One was rather obviously about AXELOS’ performance to date. More on that later, but first the other discussions which diverted into whether (ITIL) training should be of the best quality or the most accessible. John Custy (@ITSMNinja) mentioned that if ITIL exams were more expenses (based on AXELOS’ price increase) ‘maybe fewer, but more right people certified...’

This got me thinking, as I have always been a great advocate of training quality and a skeptic of the current ITIL certification scheme (see my blog from March 2013 on Action Based Learning).

However at the same time I can see the importance of training be accessible to a large audience, particular at the basic/entry/foundation level. Hence the title of this blog: Quality over Quantity/Accessibility.

The current ITIL Foundation course (or rather ‘Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management’) has become a volume-seller with around 20,000 exam each month. Plenty of organisation are sending all their IT staff to this course and the prevalence of the ITIL Foundation certificate has certainly helped to make ITIL the ‘de facto’ standard in IT Service Management.

Compare this for instance with COBIT. COBIT is seen as an equivalent if not better alternative to ITIL (with more prescriptive guidance, standard RACIs, a direct link to governance, risk, project management …). However, whilst there are COBIT qualifications available, it comprises mainly of Foundation, with then ‘specialised’ implementation or assessor courses which are not focused on general staff. And it is much harder to obtain with fewer organisation (in fewer locations) offering this course less frequently (although there is always the on-line option).

And it is a similar story with MOF (Foundation only), TOGAF (Foundation or Certified qualifications), LEAN or AGILE. Whilst there certainly is certification in those methodologies, it is far less known, far harder to obtain (not because of difficulty but because of availability) and far less recognised.

As mentioned, I believe this is part of the success of ITIL and in order to maintain this it is important that AXELOS not only maintains the quality of the ITIL certifications, but maintains or even improves the availability/accessibility/quantity. Most certainly at entry/Foundation level but also for Intermediates, which have a far smaller uptake. The more people are trained and certified in ITIL, the more people will want to use it (and the more people use it, the more we can work towards quality improvement of the theory).

That doesn’t mean that quality is not important. And whilst I hope that future updates to ITIL will improve the quality of the theory, and with it the quality of the certification (for instance a lower, operation-only Foundation, more practical and less factoid based, periodic exam refreshers to maintain higher levels, …). We need to look at the situation at hand: The Foundation is course is so prevalent that a lucrative and significant grey circuit has developed offering courses that do not (always) meet the existing quality standards. This (in my opinion) is a real threat to both AXELOS, the ATOs and the market.

For instance I believe we can all agree that the existing ITIL Foundation syllabus only just fits in a three day format. There is a lot (too much!) theory to explain and the danger is of the course becoming death-by-powerpoint, theory-overload with not enough time to discuss practical application of the principles. So, I was not overly impressed when I was approached by a (non-accredited) training organisation with the question whether I could deliver the Foundations in two (albeit extended) days … over a weekend … including the exam. I declined and sincerely question the quality and outcomes of a course like that.

Because as important as certification is, there is more to training than that. However we need to look beyond the IP-owner and training organisations and realise that it is the responsibility of the organisation/manager who sends staff to training to obtain ‘value’ from it (as well as the staff attending training). I advocate an immediate follow-up on training: at Foundation level an attendee could do a review of existing procedures, tools and documentation (and discuss any questions or suggestions with the process manager/owner). At Intermediate level this can become a more formal assessment and CSI/SIP and at Expert level the scope increases (all lifecycles) and would include tactical or even strategic customer relationships.

Anyway, bringing this rant to a close: the quality of training is paramount and any customer/participant of training is responsible for choosing the best training and getting the most out of it. The better training organisations (and fortunately there are plenty of them) will maintain quality and inject this into their offering.
The role of the ‘examiner’, in our case AXELOS, is to design a qualification scheme that is acceptable by the market, but also to maintain a delivery model that will make it available to that market.

Whilst this includes maintaining quality (EIs, ATOs, …) there is more to it. And a first action of increases the price of exams (and thus their revenue) does not necessarily give out the right signal. But that is a different discussion (on AXELOS’ performance, which I promised Andrea Kis (@AndieKis) to have in 170 days).

Best wishes for 2014!

the ITIL Zealot
January 2014