If you are a Project Manager working in or with IT, you may have heard the acronym ITIL® (IT Infrastructure Library, a set of books similar in nature to PMI’s PMBOK Guide) or ITSM (IT Service Management – the concept of IT as a “service” to the business). If you haven’t heard of ITIL, you will. Why? Simply put: in terms of industry adoption, ITIL is one of the fastest growing frameworks in the IT industry today.
ITIL helps organizations increase IT efficiency, improve quality, and control costs. In fact, AMR Research reports that IT organizations that have implemented ITIL best practices have saved up to 10% in IT costs without sacrificing the quality of service delivery. That is why U.S. Computer Economics has projected that approximately 45% of all organizations, both large and small, in the US and Canada will have adopted ITIL best practices in some form by the end of 2008.
High Demand for ITIL Expertise
Companies are turning to ITIL, and the demand for individuals with skills and expertise in this area is increasing. So much so, in fact, that ITIL certifications rank as some of the highest paid certifications in technology, along with PMI’s CAPM and PMP credentials. In recent salary surveys from ZDNet’s Tech Republic , PMI and ITIL credentials consistently rank in the top three IT certifications industry wide. With ITIL’s continued growth in the United States, the demand for IT Project Managers with expertise in ITIL will continue.
Focus is on Process, not Technology
The most compelling and interesting similarity between PMI’s PMBOK Guide and the ITIL books is that both are descriptive frameworks centered around process, not technology.
What this means to you is that both are extremely approachable standards. For example, the PMP exam does not ask how you would go about creating a milestone task within Microsoft Project. Rather, it makes sure you understand the importance of creating milestones.
The ITIL books are the same way. In order to really understand IT Service Management as a practice, you do not need to understand servers or switches. Rather, you need to understand things like the importance of controlling change, defining service levels, and maintaining a catalog of all your services to the business in terms the business can understand.
Both are bodies of knowledge covering simple principles that are drawn from deep industry experience. They both detail concepts that are scalable and adaptable to each organization. For example, the Project Plan for a small, simple project is going to look very different for a large, complex one. In the same way, the process for managing a minor software patch release is going to have a different scale of requirements compared to a brand new, enterprise-wide software release.
