ITTL - A Loophole That Allows Non Technical People To Make Good Money In I.T?

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Hi All

I'm new to this forum and relatively new to I.T. and I wanted to know your experiences with management who are ITIL trained as well as wanting to know your opinions on whether ITIL provides some value in your eyes or whether you believe it is overrated.

My personal issue with ITIL is summed up by a post I read on an ITIL blog by someone who said

''ITIL seems to be a priesthood for non-technical people to get into it''

This is my number one gripe with ITIL managers, more often than not, they dont have a clue about the systems that they are trying to support, I dont understand how you can be a service delivery manager but then not understand about the service that your company actually delivers. The better ITIL managers I have worked with are those who have years of I.T technical experience behind them and then move into service management. But time and again I see people who obviously dont even know the basics on I.T but because of ITIL, (which is essentially an idealized view of how an I.T environment should work) and a use of the ittl keywords like ''process'', ''incident'' and all that chat, they somehow find their way into making big decisions within i.t companies.

Why employers suddenly place such an emphasis on ITIL these days I dont know, so what if your company adhere's to the ITIL standard? I have worked for well known major companies with an ITIL structure in place and they provide some of the worst service on the face of this planet..... Problem managers who didn't know a single thing about the infrastructure of the system they were supposed to be doing root cause analysis for and that was just the half of it.

I wondered what other peoples views on this are, do all these ITIL managers actually add value to the service or really improve it? Would you consider it a loophole which allows the unqualified to get into positions they shouldnt be in?

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

ITTL? It's ITIL.

 

Sorry, I always type in like that mistakenly.

Information Technology Infrastructure Library is what I thought it stood for.

Any views on the subject matter?

Do ITIL managers add genuine value in your enterprise?

 

I've definitely seen some service delivery managers that were pretty useless, half of them had IT backgrounds but were obviously no good at that either so went into management...

 

It's becoming a serious problem in today's I.T environment in my opinion. I worked in customer service before starting in I.T.

Customer just want problems fixed, it's that simple, they very rarely care about the in's and out, they just want it fixed as soon as possible. Now companies need to be investing more in training members of staff who fix problems and spend less on ITIL managers, alot of the ITIL managers I have seen are great when it comes to talking about problems, or having meetings on a problem or demanding that a problem gets solved, but alot of them that I worked with do not contribute to the actual FIXING of the problem.

Its disturbing that companies are shelling out crazy money on these ITIL managers, but spending less money on staff who actually provide the core service of the business....resolving I.T issues.

 

Customers may want things fixed as quickly as possible, but are they aware of the wider implications of implementing the fix? Are you aware of the wider implications of implementing the fix?
As much as I find rigid adherence to ITIL frustrating at times, I also know that I don't have all the facts at my disposal. What may seem to me (and the customer) as a trivial change may actually impact somewhere else.

At the end of the day, ITIL is a set of guidelines that have to be fitted to the needs of the business, implemented by people who understand why things are the way they are, and continually monitored and improved in line with the changing needs of the business. If the service delivery is badly designed, not implemented correctly or not changing with business requirements then you have problems.

 

A bunch of ITIL guys with no technical experience is about as useless as a bunch of technical experts with no process management skills who forget to document their changes and prioritise based on who is shouting at them the loudest.

There is a place for both, it's getting the balance right.

 

A very valid point, but here's my issue. Just because a company adheres to ITIL guidelines does not mean they provide better service and it doesn't mean that the service delivery is implemented correctly or not badly designed. I have worked for ITIL companies that provide some of the worst service known to man, with processes that CLEARLY do not work in the real world and managers that have 0 idea about the infrastructure they are meant to be supporting.

You mentioned the implications of a fix and the impact it will have on an environment, but a non technical ITIL manager is not going to know the impact a fix will have, because they have no idea on the systems involved and how they work within the enterprise, what actually happens in the real world, is that the ITIL manager will go and ask a technical person (who in effect is doing their work for them) what the impact is, and then give a yes or no based on that. That ITIL manager in this situation is not doing anything a technical person with a knowledge of the systems could not do and the ITIL manager cannot fix the issue, so what is his use in this situation, and is it worth the vast amounts of money these people make.

 

ITIL is a good system when used correctly, we use FITS at our place which is kind of like ITIL and when its done correctly it does make everyones life easier.

ITIL is a framework, its not the holy grail of service management whereby you follow its every word to the letter, that is down to the people running the service to adapt it for their needs, but its like any system, done right it improves things, done badly and everyone is without a paddle.

Yes non IT people seem to be getting IT roles, as long as they are willing to trust there technical staff and the Techies are willing to follow procedures then this shouldnt be an issue, unfortuntely egos can get in the way on both sides.

 

Again, some very valid points raised. But here is my concerns

a) Why do companies feel it is required to spend money on a series of non technical ITL managers, how does it make common sense to allow a person who has no knowledge of your enterprise whatsoever to meet critical needs?

b) How can such an individual make informed decisions about how their I.T department can best meet the needs of the business if they have no idea on what exactly their I.T department has to offer?

c) Why pay these people £300 per day daily rates, when in actual fact, you may be able (depending on the size of your enterprise) to have a technical person trained up in ITIL and moved up into that role, instead of hiring these external people who know nothing about your business.

This is part of the reason what ITIL environments can provide awful service, because the bottom line is, it seems to be a honeypot for unqualified people who dont know what they are supporting. I wouldn't let someone make key decisions in my enterprise, unless they knew how the enterprise worked, on paper, companies may think they can work around this, but in practice, i dont buy it.


In a previous company, they were paying a problem manager a bunch of cash to chase root cause analysis for a system in which he had NO IDEA how it worked. It crippled the problem management process because this guy had no idea about

a) What the issue actually was
b) What the general cause was
c) How the issue was resolved.

And as a result he spent ages have back and forths with engineers trying to grasp the basics, the problem management sucked and cases were left to rot for ages.

He ended up leaving and they had an engineer fill the role part time instead, which obviously sped up the process drastically.

I believe the above is symptomatic of the problem ITIL (or a companies interpretation of ITIL) is causing in I.T environments, where suddenly it has become acceptable to command large amounts of money to make decisions on an enterprise you dont understand or are qualified to make decisions on.

 

My honest opinion of ITIL

Benefits
Team working to same guidelines in same direction
Proper change management helps reduce workload by avoiding mistakes and service outage cause by incorrectly applied changes or ones that make.
Knowledge bases and Configuration databases help speed up the diagnostic process, also useful for various management tasks
Better reporting for management, metrics can provide the need for extra staff or more hardware/software resources backed up by data as opposed to speculation.

Drawbacks
A lot of work implementing properly
Needs to be designed properly to fit the organisations needs
Team and company need to buy into the benefits and realise the pros and cons.

It sounds to me from that guys post the company he works for has jumped on a bandwagon and not done the proper groundwork to make sure ITIL brings benefits.

 

Agreed with most if not all of this, now with that in mind, do you think companies should be looking to take technical people/ engineers with a proven knowledge of the enterprise they will be working in and train them in ITIL with a view to pushing them into management rather than have a completely non technical individual who doesn't have the foggiest about your enterprise making these kind of decisions?

 

Unfortunately I think that ITIL is like many other standards (such as Prince2) where many people say that they embrace the methodology, but in fact don't.

So I guess it wouldn't be unusual to see a working environment where people shout ITIL all the time, yet fail to stick to the principles. That's why it all goes wrong.

It's not the method that's wrong, it's the application of it.

 

Yes, this is the conclusion I am beginning to come to also, where its not ITIL per say thats the issue, the application of it and the whole culture surrounding it.

I was contacted about an ITIL job the other day by someone who has recruited for a instantly recognizable brand name for about 10 years.

I told them i had no ITIL certs and that I had no knowledge of the business applications the company supported (things like SAP for instance) and yet I was basically told that this wasnt an issue and led to believe that this knowledge wasn't dependent on the actual job role. Now obviously I wasn't interested in this.......why would I be interested in making decisions on an enterprise I didn't understand....but you know what, other people do get into management in this way, by going into the interview and coming up with a bunch of paper talk about processes, management, incidents, SLA's and bang they find themselves in job and before you know it, these people are helping run your organization.

I know for a fact some people use ITIL as the easy way out, they have no desire to learn technical skills, but they want to move into a well paid management job where they can make big decisions, and tell people they work in I.T. So they learn ITIL foundation and they get in that way, the company may be adhering to certain ITIL processes by having these guys in their company, but these people do not BENEFIT their company and I think someone somewhere has to draw the line on these guys.

 

I agree with many of the sentiments, there was some value to having managers in the past that worked their way up from the shop floor.
To me the idea that people can try to skip the intermediate steps is just serfdom.

One aspect is all these compliance frameworks like COBIT etc just ensure jobs for middle management types.

The problems you describe are not new, management consultancy has been happening for years, 1000 pounds per day is not uncommon for clueless people to ruin your business..

In general the standard of management in the UK is woefully poor, its typical for many managers to employ various cover your ass tactics rather than worrying about delivering real business value.

Employing a chain of subordinates is just one tactic, you can delegate work but not responsibility, but that is in actual fact what tends to happen. Deep hierarchies provide excellent defence for the truly inept, just blame it on that new consultant you just hired... when that fails to work, manage your exit strategy...