ITIL Expert and ITIL Practitioner – value in having both

Today I’m certified in both ITIL Expert and Practitioner. Studying ITIL Expert came first, which I did to add value to my ability as a consultant, build my credibility and enable me to provide ITIL training sessions to customers.

ITIL Expert has provided me with the complete picture of what is possible with ITIL and, especially, how the lifecycle contributes to business value.

ITIL Practitioner and enhancing service

In the eight years between certifying in ITIL Expert and then in ITIL Practitioner in 2016, people working in the IT world have changed their perspective and become more focused on service.

I believe that, until the past few years, application and infrastructure teams didn’t really speak to each other! Since then, they’ve recognized the necessity to interact.

Clearly, each team in the organization has its own problems and interests: the application team is focused on developing new versions and doesn’t always think about whether there’s capacity to run the applications. Naturally, this can result in conflict.

The way of working has had to change from IT operating in silos to more of a service department. IT, increasingly, has needed to demonstrate value to senior management. This has become unavoidable when IT leaders in organizations experience the push from the business and are aware of the outsourcing trend!

And so, in this context, ITIL Practitioner is more a focused approach on how to adopt ITIL in an organization and it has introduced me to a new and even more practical way of embedding the guidance; for example, using the Continual Service Improvement model rather than a big bang approach.

Professional development value

For consultants wanting to develop their professional ability, I would recommend studying ITIL Expert before ITIL Practitioner. For functional IT managers, in my opinion it is better done in the reverse order.

And there is certainly value in having both, with ITIL Expert focusing overall on the value delivered to a business while ITIL Practitioner emphasizes more the practicalities of organizational adoption.

ITIL and DevOps?

It’s worth mentioning that despite the growth in popularity of DevOps, ITIL is still mandatory. I believe that you can’t contribute value if the infrastructure team isn’t using the ITIL framework.

If DevOps wants to treat infrastructure as a service environment, what you need is a reliable and predictable service environment. And, for that reason, ITIL continues to be important.