Refresh

Fresh out of the pan today, the Scope and Development Plan: ITIL® V3 Update is released. (Thanks Liz for the tip!) I'm getting ready to leave for the Pink Elephant conference in Las Vegas (see you there! Come to my sessions, or see me in booth 203), so I may not get time to comment on this document. We all welcome your comments - leave them here.

TSO has appointed the four "mentors" for the ITIL Refresh Refresh (thanks servicesphere)

All you budding ITIL authors, now is your chance.

ITIL V3, PRINCE2:2009 (The-Framework-Previously-Known-As-Prince2), ITIL V3 New Edition... and now M-o-R:2010 and MSP:2010. Yes, OGC are calling for authors for Management of Risk 2010 edition and Managing Successful Programmes 2010 edition. Go on! How hard can it be? But you better hurry...

If you are thinking the ITIL V3 2nd Edition or Refreshrefresh - or whatever it is called - is just about adding a few missing semicolons and spelling Ivor Macfarlane's name right, think again. Even if they get talked out of this plan to rewrite (read: dumb down) the whole of Service Strategy ("oooh ITIL is HARD - why can't it be easy like TV?"), take a look at some of the errors to be fixed in the books. Remember, paid authors for each book from major corporations, hundreds of reviewers, professional commercial publisher with professional editors... and we get:

"New concepts are not to be added" says OGC's "Mandate for Change", the Project Requirements for the ITIL V3 Refresh refresh

The whole of New Zealand was out by 190 metres - we're in the middle of fixing it. No big deal: redraw, rebrand, reprint, redistribute every single topographical map of the country; recalibrate/reprogram some of the GPS devices; run batch programs to change the coordinate position of everything in every database in the country; work really hard to make sure all the emergency services stay on the same page ...er... map. Simple really. Harder is telling people it is happening: nobody I speak to even knows. It would have been a little simpler if they had got it right the first time, but that is unfair criticism since technology has moved on over the however-many decades or centuries since they surveyed it for the last set of maps. The errors took a long time to show up (when GPS became widely used).

Imagine the reaction if it were to come out in a year or so that the latest set of maps is still wrong.

Once again the comment discussion on this blog has dug down to a very fundamental question: Is ITIL there to describe what the experts know? Or is it there to guide those setting out on the ITSM journey?

Just when I asked whether there was any change to ITIL V3 books, out comes Project requirements for an update to the ITIL® core publications. OGC say "scope of change is gradual and not too extensive." We've heard that before.

The IT Skeptic is now collecting everything I can find out about ITIL Version 3 on one reference page. It will apppear on the RSS feed whenever it is updated, or else if you register you can subscribe to notifications at the bottom of the reference page ("subscribe post").

For example, here is what we know about Certification: