Service management training

So, my employer has decided to centralise their IT in the US. This means that the European IT department will be cut back from over 200 people to less than 50. From my vantage point down on the shop floor it seems a crazy decision. They are throwing away some seriously good people, together with an awful lot of knowledge and expertise. Many European IT teams are light years ahead of the US in so many areas, including Service Management, Testing, .NET development, Application Security Reviews, Data warehousing, to name but a few. One area that is NOT a strength in Europe is Architecture, but they've decided to centralise that particular area of ineptitude in Europe. The mind boggles.

Anyway, one of the side effects of this decision is that Europe is being excluded from many of the projects that are underway, leaving many of us with a lot of time on our hands, little or no motivation and the prospect of finding ourselves, within 2 or 3 months, in a rather unforgiving job market. The time I have on my hands has enabled me to start this page. It has also allowed me, together with 4 colleagues, to 'develop' an unofficial training course on Service Management which we are offering to our other IT colleagues.

The aim of the training is to give an overview, in 2 half day sessions, of ITIL and Service Management and hopefully get our students to the level where they have a good chance of passing the v3 Foundations exam. Yesterday we ran our first course to a select bunch of guinea pigs to see whether we are on the right lines. Initial feedback suggests we probably are. 2 of our students, until yesterday uninitiated in the dark arts of ITIL, intend to sit the exam on Monday. I guess their results will let us know how we did. More to come...