ITIL v3 Manger’s Bridge – the way to ITIL Expert my impressions after the training

If you are already happy holders of  ITIL Service Manager Certificate (Manager’s Certificate in IT Service Management), which confirms your in-depth knowledge of all ITIL version 2 processes at manager-level, it is the highest time to start thinking of pursuing ITIL Expert certification.

“Red Badge” holders should attend in the accredited training – ITIL v3 Manager’s Bridge and pass an exam consisting of a test with 20 questions, where you can commit only 4 errors.

Two weeks ago I was at the training and that are my impressions from the training

For the training I went to the BEI, where I had the pleasure to participate in courses for IT Service Manager certification.

Course agenda in a nutshell is as follows (all courses that are accredited by EXIN have a very similar agenda, as they must be consistent with the approved syllabus)

Day 1:

• Introduction to IT service management
• Presentation of service life-cycle concept together with details of objectives and responsibilities of each phase
• Presentation of the basic issues, concepts and models related to the third version of ITIL

Day 2  – 4

• Walkthrough the ITIL  v3 process (I would say rather the activities) in phases of service life cycle
• Discussion of new functions, which appeared in the third version of ITIL (Technical Management, Application Management, IT Operations Management)
• Overview of ITIL look at the organization structure
• Discussion of factors that should be addressed during adaptation and adoption of ITIL processes in an organization

Day 4

• ITIL v3 manager bridge – mock exam

The course is intended to familiarize the participant with the novelties of ITIL v3 and I could fee that the training is really intended for people who already had they journey with IT Service Manager certification.

Similarly, as it was with the IT service Manager course a very important (even maybe the most important) element of the training was a case study and discussion with the coach and the other training participants.

The satisfaction from the kind of training depends also on the coach, because in my opinion (and also according to other participants) material that is required by syllabus omits some important things and can give a misleading impression that some of ITIL version 3 processes (e.g. service level management or incident management) have not changed at all. But a good coach, plus an inquiring group quickly can uncover processes overlooked by formal ITIL v3 Manager’s Bridge training syllabus.

An interesting thing when it comes to trainings from third version of ITIL is that there are also available online courses with accreditation (there were no accredited online ITIL v2 courses). What is important in this way they are also delivered ‘manager bridge’ trainings, maybe in the case of ITIL Foundation training the solution can be sufficient, but I must admit that somehow I can’t imagine ITIL v3 manager bridge training conducted online. The greatest value of these training are case studies (role play type) and discussions, everything that online will always be difficult to conduct.

Let me now move on to the exam, I wrote only a mock exam for ITIL v3 manager’s bridge, but I heard that it reflects well the level of complexity of the actual exam. ITIL v3 Manager’s Bridge exam consists of 20 test questions, where the right choice is one of the answers: a, b, c or d – time of 90 minutes, so at first glance, piece of cake, but …

In the test you are allowed to commit only 4 errors, the questions are case study type, there are about 7-8 mini-case studies (fortunately, each of them is much shorter than the case study for Service Manager examinations), but case studies leave room for interpretation. Although Exin clearly says that there are no tricky questions, I would not agree with them.

Finally, I must admit that I passed the sample ITIL v3 manager bridge exam (although I committed 4 errors – so before the real test I really need more self-study).

To sum up the training was very valuable, thanks to the excellent trainer and a very interesting group of course participants. You need to contribute a lot of work to pass the exam (although for those who have service manager, this should not provide such a big problem). I encourage you to participate in this training, and good luck on the way to achieve ITIL Expert credentials.