ITIL Master Certification – An Interview with Kevin Holland

The ITIL Master Certification is the next level beyond ITIL Expert and there are many thousands of ITIL Experts that are interested in progressing to this ultimate level of qualification in ITIL. To help explain how it works, we interviewed one of our Service Management heroes, Kevin Holland.

Kevin is a well known figure in the UK public sector IT arena, working on the NHS IT Program.  He’s also been instrumental in helping to develop the ITIL Master qualification. You can read more about Kevin here.

Interview Questions

Kevin, tell us about your background – how did you start in service management?

My background was in private sector IT, starting with software development and engineering, then moving into support and operations management, in a range of small organisations.  I sort of ‘fell into’ service management in the late 1990s, when I was the Information Systems Manager for a UK vehicle manufacturer.

Kevin Holland

I remember reading about ITIL one day and thinking ‘so that’s what they call it!’  By then I’d already designed, implemented and operated most of the ITIL processes based on common sense and examples from other disciplines.  That was swiftly followed by a move into a mainstream service management position, as Service Delivery Manager for Carlsberg UK, and then into the NHS as a Service Management Specialist working on large service management programmes.

What challenges do you face in the public sector and what are the main differences you’ve found between the public and private sectors?

I came into the public sector with an open mind, and hence wasn’t surprised to find that nearly all the challenges faced by the public sector are very much the same as those faced by the private sector, but with one particular additional challenge – the need to have business cases approved for investments. Getting approval to invest in IT service management in the private sector is challenging enough, but in many organisations you can use the ‘hearts and minds’ approach – for example – ‘Everyone else is implementing ITIL,  so it must be a good thing, so why don’t we do it as well?’.

In the public sector you also have to be able to demonstrate that there will be a return on investment and that you will get value for money – both of these requirements make you think hard very about why you need IT service management, precisely what you need, and how you are going to implement. Having to justify the investment in this way leads to successful implementations of service management, which perhaps is one reason why there are lots of very good implementations across the whole spectrum of the public sector.

Now that ITIL V3 (or ITIL as we should call it now!) is bedded in, what’s your view of the service lifecycle?  Is it working?

The service lifecycle always worked!  The issue was that many in IT service management thought that ITIL was just about service support and service delivery, which of course it wasn’t. The first edition of the ITIL books covered the whole lifecycle, and so did the second edition, however only 2 of the books were well known – the good old Service Support and Service Delivery books. Unfortunately that resulted in a very limited mind-set scope for many people working in IT service management. For example, how many service managers have responsibility for the availability of test environments?

The latest edition of ITIL has re-opened the eyes of many to the importance of applying service management all the way through from strategy to operation, improvement, and retirement.  This includes IT staff outside of service management, in functions including technical architecture and software testing, who now ‘get’ what ITIL is about – the management of IT services through their entire lifecycle.

You’ve been instrumental in developing the ITIL Master qualification – can you give us a brief summary? 

The ITIL Master is the highest level qualification in the suite of ITIL qualifications. The qualification validates the capability of the candidate to apply ITIL principles, methods and techniques and to achieve business outcomes in one or more ‘real-life’ workplace assignments.  It is about being able to demonstrate and evidence practical application to solve real-life problems.

For the latest details on the ITIL Master Certification – see the official ITIL qualifications page.

The candidate selects which assignments and which bits of ITIL they are going to use to demonstrate their capability. There is no syllabus as such, but there is a set of requirements that need to be met. These include the need to demonstrate broader skills such as task and risk management, analysis, use of metrics, planning, and changing the attitude, behaviour, and culture of an organisation. The candidate demonstrates their capability by writing up a Work Package to describe the assignments, how they were tackled, and what they achieved, making sure that they address all of the requirements.  This is assessed and is then supplemented by an Interview with the candidate.

The qualification has been designed so that it does not explicitly include or exclude particular job roles. To be eligible, you have to be an ITIL Expert, and have worked in ITSM for at least 5 years in leadership, managerial, or higher management advisory roles.  The assignments that you pick must demonstrate your capability to apply ITIL. There is no time limit on how far back you can go to select your assignments, but you must select the principles, methods and techniques from the ITIL V3 core books.

The qualification has been through a successful Alpha pilot, with the award of the first of the ITIL Master Certificates. It is currently going through the final stages of a Beta pilot to check and hone the operational processes before a full launch in the next few months (from October 2011).

Where do you see service management in the future? How have you seen it change?

Let’s be honest, over 75% of organisations still think that once they have a Service Desk that they have ’done service management’ , and never do anything more than incident management, re-active problem management, rudimentary change management, with a few inappropriate and unwanted service levels thrown in for good measure.

The majority of the principles, methods, and techniques from ITIL and elsewhere lie neglected and unused. Sadly I haven’t seen that change much over the last few years.  What a wasted opportunity!

Service management is now at a crossroads in its life. Unless we dust off those neglected and unused bits, understand and implement them, and reap the benefits to the business and IT, then I have a concern that service management as a profession will fade away. The take-up of IT services provided as utilities from the Public Cloud will most likely accelerate our demise, as our user departments will be able to get applications with a credit card and a mouse click, with no need to involve IT or Service management. Unless we re-position service management, and adopt the processes that are rarely touched, then we will stay as ‘the Service Desk’.

Where do we need to focus our re-positioning?  The first key areas are Service Strategy, where we should be engaging with the business to identify where we can add value in the new technological landscape, with processes such as service portfolio management and requirements management.  That needs to be swiftly followed by Service Design, creating workable end-to-end designs for Cloud and other services, designing in viable support routes and achievable/affordable service levels from the outset. Service Transition of course comes next, with new challenges of testing and deploying commodity Cloud based services to the desktop.

Service Operation, where everyone currently focuses, will get a lot leaner – for example, how can you do problem management for commodity services run from a public Cloud? When we get to Continual Service Improvement, just how are you going to do service level management for a commodity service where you get what you get? You’re going to need new ways to manage and incentivise suppliers.

Service management should be the function that understands the user requirements for services, goes out to find services with the correct capabilities, designs the full service wrap, tests the services with the users, deploys them, and then manages the supplier and business relationships. What a surprise – that’s the Service Lifecycle! Hence the sooner we understand and adopt the parts of it that we don’t currently use, the better!

What advice would you give anyone who is just starting out in service management?

Make sure that you get good quality training – and I mean training, not just education, across the whole spread of service management processes. ITSM is an integrated whole, and you need to understand how the bits fit together, and how to use the techniques.

Your ITIL Training should be obtained from courses that take the time to allow you to practice the techniques, followed by practising them in the workplace, with a mentor alongside you to help and advise, supplemented by complementary subjects such as how to change attitude, behaviour and culture, and COBIT.

Just getting a certificate to say you have passed an exam is not enough – just like all skills, you have to repeatedly apply what you have learnt to become proficient.

Finally, get involved in the large number of service management communities that exist: LinkedIn, ITSMF, and plenty more.  There are plenty of people out there who will willingly help you in your learning  and experience.

Thank you for your Time Kevin!

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