PMP & ITIL Study Guide

Summary:
What eligibility requirements must I meet in order to complete the PMP Certification process?

The Project Management Professional (PMP) program is the formal Certification of Project Managers. This program helps to ensure the highest professional and ethical standards within the community of practicing
Project Management Professionals.

Eligibility Criteria
To complete the PMP Certification process, candidates must satisfy all requirements in one of two categories.

Category 1: With a baccalaureate degree
PMP candidates must:
1.Document at least three calendar years experience in project management (during the past six years), including at least 4,500 hours experience within the five recognized project management process groups.
2. Document at least 35 contact hours of formal training in project management.
3. Pass the PMP Certification Exam.

Category 2: Without a baccalaureate degree PMP candidates must:
1. Document at least five calendar years experience in project management (within the past eight years), including at least 7,500 hours experience within the five recognized project management process groups.
2. Document at least 35 contact hours of formal training in project management.
3. Pass the PMP Certification Exam.

Applying
The PMP Application can be completed either online (at www.pmi.org) or with paper forms.

The Application consists of three sections:

1. PMP Certification Examination Application Form
This section consists of three pages and includes all of your general information: name, address, contact information, educational background. This section can be completed quickly.

2. Project Management Education Form
This section is a one-page form that asks you to document your 35 contact hours in project management training. This section can be completed quickly.

3. Project Management Experience Verification Form
This section uses a two-page form to document each of your projects during your experience period. This is the most time-consuming portion of the Application. It involves doing some spadework gathering all the information necessary to complete this section. Summarize your project management experience, include the project names, and companies for whom you did the projects.

Your Certification Fee must accompany your application (credit card only if online). The fee is $405 for PMI members, $555 for non-members.

PMI takes around 10 to 14 working days to process your Application.
Once your Application is approved, you will receive an eligibility letter with identification code and detailed testing information. You must take your exam within six months. Application Forms are available for review and/or download anytime at www.pmi.org.

Caution: Be thorough, accurate and honest with your Application information. To help maintain quality and integrity in the PMP Certification Program, PMI audits a significant percentage of accepted Certification Applications. It's best to assume that your application will be one of them. The audit process involves formal verification by your employer(s) and schools. It is best not to exaggerate any of your application information. If invalid information is found during the audit process, you will be stripped of your Certification. If you do not quite meet any of the eligibility criteria, it is best to wait until you can honestly satisfy the criteria before applying.

For project managers involved in initiating, planning, execution and closure of a  project, the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from the PMI may be the right Certification to pursue. In the IT field, the PMP may be right for managers who are heavily involved in areas such as software engineering or network design IT projects. The PMP certification demonstrates that a project manager understands the fundamentals of project management and can put them into practice.
Some Advantages:

• It gives companies a level of comfort and assurance that the PMP certification holder demonstrates that a project manager understands the fundamentals of project management and can put them into practice.
  
• The PMP certification might make your name stand out in a stack of resumes. With all things being equal, having the PMP certification would be a key differentiator in the job market.
  
• Many organizations have their own project management style that includes both good and bad haits. Certification reinforces the good stuff and provides standards and structure to change the bad habits.
  
• PMI's project management standards provide a solid base that makes it easier to introduce changes to internal methods and processes.
  
• The PMP certification is good for managers, but it's also good for employers. PMP makes an employee more valuable in attracting business.
  

ITIL Service Management Foundation Certification is a first step to start the career in ITIL. The foundation certification is a passport for the next certificates: practitioner and manager (master). Before preparation to the course it is good to know which certification company is going to be involved in the process. There are two main accredited companies which organize the preparation and exams: EXIN and ISEB - these two companies have already been described on the main page of this portal. Depending on the company people select, the more or less material is to be covered. To pass EXIN exam there's a need to take a look at Security Management module of the ITIL Foundation. This is the only difference between EXIN and ISEB exams.

The remaining but common things in exams are:


- multiple choice exam (only one answer in a question is correct)
- the exam takes exactly 1 hour (60 minutes)
- to pass the foundation exam 26 out of 40 points should be correct. There are always 40 questions on the exam
- EXIN and ISEB ITIL certification is a pre-requisite for the practitioner and manager's certificates

Before the exam it is good to spend at least 3 days for learning the materials. The ITIL foundation exam covers 13 modules (in EXIN)and ISEB exam covers only 12 modules (excluding Security Management module as mentioned before). The modules are divided into Service Delivery and Service Support parts. Good preparation to the exam means reading all the training materials at least 2 times. After good preparation questions are very easy to pass the exam even in 30 minutes, however some questions are very tricky, that is why all of them should be read very carefully.

The example exam question can be:

Which of the examples below is not an example of a configuration item?
a. A PC cooms cart
b. A user manual
c. A company's organization chart
d. A unique identification number

The correct answer is "d" as the unique identification number is an attribute in Configuration Management Database.

The ITIL Practitioner Certificate in IT Service Management (ITIL Practitioner) is a proof that certified person has a deep knowledge in one of the ITIL processes. As the name of the certificate indicates, practitioner certification is not only about understanding but also about practice and specialty.

Currently there are 3 different areas covered by practitioner certification. These are:
- Release and Control (ITIL Practitioner Release and Control Certification)
- Support and Restore (ITIL Practitioner Support and Restore Certification)
- Agree and Define (ITIL Practitioner Support and Restore Certification)

Each of the practitioner certifications is a pass to the manager's certificate. It is good to know that the best ITIL managers are certified in all the areas mentioned above - this is because manager's certificate is not about only one area but about all of them. That's why it is worth to deeply understand all aspects of ITIL processes before attending to manager's certificate.

Practitioner level is dedicated usually for team leaders and specialists who would like to spread out their knowledge onto new subjects. The courses are highly recommended befor taking the exam. The average training for one set of processes mentioned above takes 5 days and is followed by the exam.

The practitioner exam is very simillar to the foundation exam and consists of 40 questions - multiple choice. 26 points are required to pass the exam. Please note that before taking practitioner exam you have to posses ITIL Foundation Certification.

How ITIL-based IT Help Desk can help Small and Medium Businesses 

Table Of Contents

• Introduction
  
• How ITIL can help SMBs to streamline IT Service Support?
  
• Managing Chaos with ITIL
  
• Planning your ITIL Implementation
  
• 
   

  Implementing an ITIL-based Help Desk
  

  • Incident Management
    
  • Problem Management
    
  • Configuration Management Database
    
  • Change Management
    
• Summary
  
• Acknowledgements
  
  

Introduction:

Everybody knows Bob! Bob works in the IT department of a Financial Services company. When the Office staff have a problem, they call him and say, "Hey Bob, I have a situation here, Can you fix it". Bob knows all the employees by name and their assets details. He fixes all problems and runs a great show. The business is going great and the company expands adding more employees providing them more IT Services. Can Bob still run the show? Let us see how ITIL-based Help Desk Software can help Bob and businesses with IT Help Desk team similar to Bob's run a great show and provide uninterrupted IT services.

How ITIL can help SMBs to streamline IT Service Support?

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a framework of best practices to manage IT operations and services. Government of Commerce, UK defined ITIL in the mid 1980s for business to efficiently manage their IT environment. ITIL 's main objective is to align business and Information Technology. ITIL's IT Service Support process helps organizations to efficiently manage software, hardware, and human resource services to ensure continued and uninterrupted business. ITIL defines that the core function of IT Service is to offer "uninterrupted and best possible service" to all users. It defines 5 processes such as Incident Management, Problem Management, Configuration Management, Change Management, and Release Management to offer uninterrupted and best possible service. ITIL does not mandate enterprises and organization to implement all the framework specifications. This freedom to choose is one of the prime reasons why ITIL is still very relevant even today to enterprises of all sizes. SMBs need to have a cost savings approach to ITIL implementation; this approach helps them to adopt the right features without getting caught in standards-sake ITIL implementations.

Here is an illustration that shows how SMBs can manage an IT environment with an ITIL-based Service Support solution. Consider an Office with users having IT and non-IT assets. Consider that IT and non-IT asset services are handled by the IT Support team and Quality of Service offered is at an excellent level. The Excellent QOS is an end result of the IT Support team and all the components such as IT, non-IT assets, and complete IT infrastructure functioning at their best. As shown in the illustration, all requests from users are classified as Incidents and problems, a workaround is suggested to ensure that normal operations and services are not affected. Problems are traced to their root cause and a Change is initiated to eliminate problems and related incidents. Using ITIL's Incident, Problem, Configuration, and Change Management, the IT Support staffs continually ensure that all components perform at their best level, to contribute to the Excellent Quality of Service.

Managing Chaos with ITIL

Most SMBs start with a modest email-based IT Support setup, but as they grow and as service requests increase, the quality of service drops drastically. The IT support team gets into a fire-fighting mode, just resolving requests to avoid service failure. Without ITIL, there is no vision to proactively identify and resolve problems before it affects service and business. ITIL provides the framework or the "common sense approach" to IT service support so that each issue is analyzed to determine the root cause. Finally, the root cause of the problem is eliminated to prevent similar problems in the future.

Steps to implement ITIL

• Make a clear plan of high-level goals to be achieved with the ITIL implementation
  
  
• Implement an ITIL-based Service Desk with Incident, Problem, Change, and Configuration Management
  
  

Planning your ITIL Implementation

Enterprises need to plan ITIL implementation with clearly defined short term and long-term goals. This helps enterprises to stay focused on their vision with every step and on the whole move.

A simple plan with the following key points can help SMBs to stay focused and implement ITIL successfully.

• What is the Vision?
  
  
• Where are we now?
  
  
• Where do we want to be?
  
  
• How do we get where we want to be?
  
  
• Check Milestones to ensure the organization is head towards defined vision
  
  

Implementing ITIL-based Help Desk

Enterprises can implement an ITIL based Help Desk for proactive IT service management and to reduce service downtime. Consider a financial services company with multiple teams of employees. Employees are spread across two floors and all employees have a workstation to run their applications. Employees access a shared resource pool of printers to print out cheques or transaction reports. Employees print cheques often as they sanction loans and provide financial reports to customers. Workstation or printer failure can be critical for business. Let us see how IT Help Desk staff can implement an ITIL-based Help Desk solution to identify and manage service requests, eliminate problems and provide uninterrupted service.

Incident Management

When an employee sends a request saying that he is unable to print. There can be various reasons why he is unable to print, the service staff needs to ask the right questions to understand and pin point service problems. Here are a few possibilities.

In this instance a single user being unable to print, this affects the user alone and might not affect business in a big way. This event only reduces the overall QOS from Excellent to Good, so this event can be classified as an Incident.

Problem Management


The Office operations are not affected in a big way by Incidents, as only a single employee is affected in this case. But when another employee or a group of employees send requests communicating that they are unable to print. In this case, when the second incident is raised, a basic check is performed with the knowledge base for matching incidents. If there are matching similar individual Incidents pointing to a single point of failure. This might be classified as a problem as it might adversely affect business as a group of employees are affected. The Support Staff must provide resolve the situation to restore the QOS. After asking the Right Questions and getting the Right Details, the support staff zero in on the problem. Say if there is a printer malfunction that is causing the problem. The printer needs to be replaced and normal operation must be restored to affected users at the earliest.

The main goal of problem management is to find the root cause of the problem proactively and eliminate all the related incidents. The Support staff can get back configuring the workstation or rectifying or by providing users an alternative way to print.

Configuration Management Database

The CMDB is one integrated database that contains all the details about employees, workstations, devices, incidents, problems, changes, and complete details of all the components in business. It provides a public Knowledge base of Known errors and solutions that help employees search and resolve minor incidents themselves with out contacting the Help Desk. It provides private knowledge base for the Support Staff get detailed reports about all assets with problem history, work-around and temporary fixes.

Change Management

Now employees are given a workaround to print, still the problem remains and points to the printer. A detailed report with workstation and printer problem history from the CMDB shows that the printer has been failing repeatedly. To eliminate the problem, the printer needs to be changed and replaced with a new printer to restore normal services. A change is initiated to resolve a problem and a proposal is raised to replace the old faulty printer with a new printer. A proposal to change printer is submitted for approval, the approver can be IT manager or COO based on the cost of purchase. A detailed plan is prepared to implement change with a roll-back plan acting as a safety net. After implementing the change, the requestor needs to verify that change was successful.

Enterprises can continually ensure excellent QOS by implementing Incident, Problem, Configuration, and Change management process to efficiently and proactively handle service requests.

Summary

Growing SMB with an expanding IT environment often struggle to provide uninterrupted IT services to users. Enterprises need to adopt a standards based solution to handle their IT services.

• ITIL can help IT support staff to control IT environment and provide uninterrupted IT Service at best QOS
  
  
• Enterprises must adopt a cost saving approach while implementing ITIL
  
  
• The Cost saving approach will help SMBs to plan and implement ITIL in the right way without getting lost in the standards
  
  
• "Chaos Management with ITIL" shows how enterprises can plan and implement ITIL to proactively handle issues using Incident, Problem, Configuration, and Change Management and maintain excellent QoS.
  
  

Getting back to Bob, ITIL can help Bob manage IT Services, no matter how big his IT environment expands. It can help Bob and his team, resolve problems faster and prevent a few from even arising.

Course Overview

This three-day official ITIL® V3 Foundations certification
course provides you with a general overview of the IT Service Management Lifecycle which is outlined in ITIL's five core books – Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual Service Improvement. ITIL's "service lifecycle" consists of 24 processes and four functions. These include:

What You Will Learn

The course is designed as an introduction to ITIL and enables you to understand how an integrated ITSM framework can be utilized to achieve IT business integration, cost reductions and increased productivity. The agenda includes:

• What is ITIL; its strategic and operational benefits; and an overview of ITIL's certification program
  
• ITIL's key concepts, definitions and objectives
  

  ITIL's "service-driven lifecycle" approach, and the structure, components and processes and functions of the five core ITIL books. For each of the five core books and the related processes and functions, the course provides:
  

  • A high level description of the main activities, goals and benefits
    
  • Process interrelationships and interdependencies, what "process integration" and "business integration" really mean
    
  • Key metrics and management reporting
    

The course prepares you for the examination leading to the Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management. This certification is the prerequisite for the Intermediate and Expert levels of ITIL certification.

Benefits

• Take the world's most popular classroom-based ITIL Foundations course from the originators of ITIL training
  
• Industry-leading – benefit from Pink's highly knowledgeable consultants
  
• Convenient – courses scheduled regularly through the year
  
• Comprehensive – accredited courseware covers key areas of ITIL V3, preparing you for the official exam
  
  

Course & Instructor Accreditation

Pink Elephant is globally accredited to provide ITIL education for the certification program. The organization is accredited by the Examination Institute for Information Science (EXIN), the Information Systems Examination Board (ISEB), and Loyalist Certification Services (LCS).

Your instructor is a highly experienced ITIL-certified member of Pink Elephant's consulting team. Further, he or she is qualified to teach this course as defined by Pink Elephant's internal Certified Trainer Program. You can expect to learn from an individual with the industry's deepest knowledge on how to lead a successful implementation project. This knowledge is a direct result of Pink Elephant's vendor neutrality – as well as many years of experience implementing ITIL processes in a variety of organizations worldwide.

Who Should Attend & Prerequisites

ITIL Foundation is suitable for anyone working in IT services requiring more information about the ITIL best practice framework. Or, individuals who are V2 certified and wish to upgrade their knowledge.

There are no mandatory prerequisites. Work experience in IT services is recommended.

Exam, Certifications & Awards

• This course prepares participants for the examination leading to the Foundation Certificate In IT Service Management. A 60-minute, 40 question, multiple-choice exam is scheduled on the last day of the course, and is administered by an independent examination body. For online courses, the exam may be scheduled and completed online. A passing mark of 65% is required to receive your certificate. A sample exam is delivered during the course to help prepare attendees for the final exam
  
• 2 ITIL credits
  
• You will attain 18 professional development units (PDUs) for Project Managers
  

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The ITIL abbreviation stands for IT Infrastructure Library. Originally, ITIL was developed by the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) as a set of comprehensive and iter-related codes of practice. In IT community such code of good practice was / is very useful in terms of achieving the efficient support and delivery of high quality, cost effective IT services. CCTA, renamed the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) maintains the library and releases all updated related to ITIL.

The OGC is an office of HM Treasury (UK). It acts as an independent of any commercial interests organization involved in ITIL (independent from software companies, software vendors, integrators, training protocols). This is why the ITIL is so widely used - its main asset is in dependency.

ITIL is accredited by Information Systems Examinations Board (ISEB). ISEB is an organization which prepares delegates for the ITIL Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management. The ISEB was formed in 1967 and currently functions under the auspices of the British Computer Society (BCS). The ISEB aims to provide industry-recognized qualification that measure competence, ability and performance in many areas of information systems, whit the aim of raising industry standards, promoting career development and providing competitive edge for employers.

Another organization which provides ITIL examination is EXIN. The EXIN is an independent organization, Dutch-based IT examination provider. The EXIN establishes educational requirements, develops and organize examinations in the field of Information Technology. The main goal of EXIN is to promote the quality of the Information Communication Technology (ICT) sector and the ICT professionals working in this sector by means of independent testing and certification.