Why Every Software Developer Needs ITIL V4 Foundation Certification

When a couple of developers failed ITIL V4 Foundation certification months ago, everyone treated it with a pinch of salt.

They all berated it, except me.

How did it start?

Our organization paid for the ITIL V4 Foundation training and certification exam sometime, in March 2020. As part of the banking regulations that all bank IT staffers must be certified in the certification, my bank and I mandated that all developers that failed the exams must retake it at their own cost.

Months rollback without any actions. We were hesitant to re-enroll and pass it until a deadline was fixed. Few days to the timeline everyone was in a rush to possess the badge.

After all said and done, I re-enrolled. Eventually, I passed it in a flying colour — 85% score.

Meanwhile, others are still yet to do the needful.

Two things are responsible for the delay. One, the harsh economic reality generated by the Corona pandemic stopped many of us. Two, the perceived non-value addition of the badge.

Unlike others, I feel differently.

My takeaway from the course

ITIL V4 Foundation moves you forward. DevOps speed the movement. PMP organizes the movements — Jakes Ajao

Going through the two major lines of component that the ITIL offers: Service Value System and Four Dimension of Service Management, I cannot agree more that ITIL is the best way to drive an organization’s innovation, at a little cost. It is the best way for value co-creation between producers and consumers, at a cost affordable by both parties.

For developers, the Guiding principle from the Service Value System component really addresses the flaws common to average developers. Software Developers are respected to create amazing products, no doubt. But only a handful adapt optimization best practices in their automation. A key guiding principle of Optimize and Automate in Guiding principle is the answer to this issue.

Optimization practice is understanding what to add or what do discard, while still maintaining the desired quality and result.

Another issue is that an average developer hungers to develop a rapid product. In fact, we are hardwired to automate every part of the PID or design document or perhaps the manual process; we roll our sleeves and get our hands dirty in order to get the job done every time we wake up.

Nothing is bad in that. Only that the ITIL offers a better approach.

To design a quality product without sacrifice customer taste that is where ‘Keep it simple and practical’ comes into the picture, another out of the box component of the ITIL guiding principle. Keep it simple and practical say that you should eliminate unnecessary and complex processes that do not add value to the flow. This top what rookie developers fail to do simply because they do not know any better.

Interestingly, the ITIL comes handy here.

The ITIL practice is inexhaustible!

These were just few practices that I connected with when I breezed through the course. And I am glad I did!