v3 foundation exam

Recently asked on LinkedIn: "How to prepare for the ITIL Foundation Certification v.3?".
My recommendations follows.

To increase your chances, I would not recommend a preparation before the training but:

• before the training: find/buy ITIL practice tests,
• during the training: take notes, build a glossary, sum-up each chapter in your own words,
• before the exam, do as many practice tests as possible while making sure your sum-ups are covering all the questions,
• the day before the exam: forget the books/manuals, just make sure you have your glossary and your sum-ups in min,
• during the exam: relax, quickly answer the easy question first, take some time on the remaining questions, keep 5 minutes to review the easy questions.

Talking about power consumption...

As an IT manager, you have many different reasons to monitor the power consumption of your equipments, individually, and as a whole:

• ecological: reduce the environmental impact of the activity
• financial: drive down energy cost
• availability: make sure a power circuit is not about to trip
• scalability: know how many servers you can add on a circuit, in a rack or a datacenter
  
• troubleshooting: detect incident like A/C issues

Some basic rules I always recommend:

Even if you have a team on site 24/7, always use manageable power bars, that will allow you to track the power consumption of your equipments and power then up and down remotely.

Configure your bars so that all the servers are not powered up at the same time if the power happen to go down and up. A "boot surge" could trip the circuit even if you are far from the limit when the systems are operating. You can also use this delay between the servers startups to handle servers/services dependencies (boot a file storage first for example).

Never exceed 70% of the amperage of a circuit. Even if the power consumption appear very stable, servers needs much more juice to cool down when the A/C fails.

Understand how your servers behave on an energy standpoint when booting, when rebuilding a RAID container, when the CPU load is high, when the temperature raises...

Recently, I have discovered a $29.90 tool that helped me a lot: Kill-A-Watt.

Connect a server to this device and stresstest it. You'll immediately see the Volts, Amps, Watts, Hz and VA.

How green is ITIL?

Today, I have discovered the world's first social reality game with Akoha and one of the mission I have been assigned is "Give a compact fluorescent bulb to somebody".

Earlier in the day, our web designer at MOBIVOX stopped by my desk, watched our printer, to tell me that this model consumes 80 Watts, not while operating, 80 Watts when it's in a stand by/sleep mode.

So what's my contribution to protecting our environment if I replace an incandescent bulbs by a fluorescent bulbs but don't bother checking the power consumption of office or production equipments? Will ITIL help/educate me?

Well, you won't find any explicit support for green issues in ITIL. If you host your datacenter, your power bill is probably at the top of your recurring costs. How come you're on your own?

ITIL's ultimate goal is to deliver best value IT services while driving down costs and reducing power consumtion, increasing recycling and reuse provide clear opportunities for financial gain.
It is, therefore, unfortunate that the version 3 fails to address the environmental impact question.

ITIL v3 will provide you better tools than v2 to achieve your environemental goals, but tools only, not guidelines.

IT director will be under increasing pressure to incorporate the environmental impact into any decision making, so I hope v4 will be much greener. Too bad that we have to wait a couple of years.

Step 7: implementing corrective action

Last episode so it's time to use the knowledge gained to optimize, improve and apply corrective actions.

You have identified many area of improvement, however you can't implement them all.
Priority is to be decided not only based on goals and objectives but also on regulatory requirements, competition moves or political decisions.

Corrective action if too often done in reaction to a single event that caused a severe outage and Continual Service Improvement is too often brought back up only once someone's complaining too loudly.

CSI requires ongoing attention, a well-thought-out plan, consistent attention to monitoring, analysing and reporting results with an eye toward improvement.

And all the 7 steps needs attention.

Step 6: presenting and using the information

Our sixth episode is about creating reports and presenting information, which is an activity that is done in most organizations to some extent or another.

There is no value in the work done so far if we don't take our knowledge and present it, that is, turn it into wisdom by utilizing reports, monitors, action plans, reviews, evaluations and opportunities.

First, carefully think about the target audience and its needs/expectations. Format the collected data into knowledge that all levels can appreciate.
Then, keep in mind that managers at all levels are bombarded with too many e-mails, too many meetings, too many reports. So be concise and effective.

Some of the common problems associated with the presenting and reporting
activity:

• everyone gets the same report (where business, senior management and IT managers are 3 very different audiences with different needs/expectations)
• lack of an executive summary
• too much over-killing supporting data
• data presented in terms that are not understandable by the target audience (for example, availability is reported in percentages when the business often is interested in knowing the number, duration and impact of outages)