Experience of taking up an ITIL Foundation exam.

As part of my resolution to learn something, an hour every day, after spending spending 7 months on Agile i was looking to take up something new. That's what made me to take up ITIL foundation. Let me share my experience.

I went through an ITIL youtube playlist to get an overview on the contents of ITIL. I think this playlist contents is aligned with v2 foundation however it gives a fair understanding of core elements of ITIL. In the meanwhile i was also trying to figure out how to take the exam and which course material should i read. I decided to go with thoughtrock as i found the price of study material along with the exam worth while. Though not a R.E.P of PMI their 26 hours course + completion of exam helped me to obtain 26 PDU's for my PMP. I registered this under Category B in gaining PDU.

Taking about thought rock material is very raw and is literally an "audio reader" of their presentations. ITIL foundation is fairly an easier course than PMP or ACP but i wouldnt say its a cake walk. Learnings of PMP does match at times with many topics in ITIL. I took a good one month to complete course  and also did some reading and browsing while taking up the online tutorial.

I tried a few practice exams during my prep. There arent much free question sets available for ITIL so once i completed a few reliable ones i started redoing the same. Thoughtrock study material also has two good sample questions sets and also you can find a sample question on ITIL offical site. I will share the bookmark of all the links i used for the exam in the bottom of this blog.

Thought rock provide Loyalty exam code along with their material to take ITIL foundation exam from home. This was my first experience of taking an exam online from home. The process was pretty smooth and easy. The proctor was friendly and guides you well through the process. Only noticeable point is that though in the instruction they say get a printer configured for the exam, ITIL foundation exam doesnt need a printer and you can skip configuring a printer.

I passed the exam with a good 85% , process was the category where i didnt do well. Like PMP questions even these ones are tricky and you need to solve 40 questions in an hour. I finished them in 30 minutes and reviewed my answers twice ( but that didnt help much :) because i didnt deter from a single answer i previously selected) 

ITIL study reference bookmarks and sample question links

Download these html to view as bookmarks. If you directly open you would see only the html contents.

My 5 five cents: Core stages of life cycle are : SDTOC - Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation, Continuous service improvement.

Although an overused statement i really think its important for the success of a venture to:  Vision -> mission -> goals -> objectives - > CSF (critical success factor) -> KPI (key performance indicator) -> define metrics - > measure whats in real time.

-> = should be converted