ITIL Refresh v3 - Update

There are a lot of rumours flying around at the moment centred around the OGC's Commercial Activities Recompetition (CAR) project which many fear will have a negative impact on the ITIL Refresh and indeed, the future of ITIL, training and its' qualification scheme currently adminsitered by the ISEB and EXIN. The OGC released an official statement on 15th June 2006 to try and mitigate these concerns, although I have to say that I am still concerned and will continue to watch this space.

The other major news in ITIL at the moment is the publication of the ITIL v3 Refresh Scope and Development Plan and the revised Glossary of Terms, Definitions and Acronyms.

I haven't quite read through both documents yet, but I'll post some of my observations once I have. At the moment I'm cringing at the idea of having to purchase an entire library in order to follow a process through the entire lifecycle. Mind you, if they were to publish each process as an entire lifecycle in addition to the lifecycle books themselves then that might help. At this stage I'm really not sure!

Into the frying pan - My first 'major' project - part 3

A couple of weeks into the project I was told by the board that I was to use PrInCE2 Lite methodology to manage the project - and they wanted a PID. PrInCE2? A PID? What's are they when they're at home? I made haste to the office of our resident qualified practitioner who thankfully took pity on my ignorance and walked me towards the light.

A few hours later I emerged with a seriously high-level overview of Prince 2 (which I now knew was yet another wonderful acronym - PRojects IN Controlled Environments) and some standard templates all prepared to write the PID (i.e. Project Initiation Document a.k.a. PDS - Project Definition Statement).

When I say seriously high level I mean that I came out knowing what SU, IP, DP, CS, MP, SB, CP, and PL stood for and a rough idea of what was needed in each - and I mean rough! For those of you not familiar with Prince 2 it is pretty hefty and not something that can be learnt just like that. I am not qualified and rather keen to attend a course so I can get my head around it all!

Anyhow, once I delved into the template for the Project Initiation Document I cringed. There were yet more terms I didn't know, and sections that needed answers that I didn't yet have.

Thankfully you need not scour the web for such definitions as I have 2 links to recommend that will make quite the difference. The first is the Glossary of Terms (9 page PDF for download). The second is not exclusively Prince 2 but a truly excellent resource - Wideman Comparative Glossary of Project Management Terms v3.1.

In the next part of this saga, I will talk about the stakeholders and how I got their input (and in some cases how I failed to do so!).