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FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

What’s the difference between ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000?

ITIL contains a wealth of best practice advice, which has been developed over many years. It has recently been revamped to form Version 3 and now consists of a core set of five books. ISO/IEC 20000 came out in 2005 and sits on top of ITIL, effectively as an auditable subset of it.

If you successfully implement ISO/IEC 20000 you will also have implemented a significant (and some would argue the most useful) part of ITIL V3.

Why should I Implement IT service management good practice?

Over the last few years we have seen first hand the huge benefits that implementing IT service management process improvements brings, the main ones being:

A major shift from reactive to proactive in the delivery of the service
Huge improvements in the morale of your staff
A much better relationship with the business
Getting a lot more out of your existing people and assets
A real drop in the number of incidents logged by users

Is it hard to do?

There is a perception amongst IT Managers and Professionals that IT service improvement is hard. We believe this is plain wrong. We have worked with several IT teams who started with this view and within a surprisingly short period of time they have achieved major benefits, and never look back.

If I decided to go for certification to ISO/IEC 20000 how long would it take?

It depends how much resource you put into it, but from our direct experience a typical timescale for our clients is around 12 months. This is with an average level of effort and other projects going on at the same time.

Is my IT team too small to implement IT service management?

No. We have helped organisations to achieve the ISO/IEC 20000 standard with a team of 4 staff. What matters are the processes and the service, not the size of your team.

Which publications might I find useful?

A number of books have been published by the BSI and ITSMF to help you understand more about IT service management and what may be involved in implementing it. For a selection of these, please visit the Public IT Shop.