ISO/IEC 20000:2018 Foundation
After taking the 27001 Foundation last week, I decided to give it a try and peek into ISO 20000 as well. I had passed an ITIL V3 Foundation cert almost a decade ago and figured it would be a good fit to refresh some insights on IT Service Management aka ITSM. It’s somehow bread and butter to a lot of organizations, and 20k is also a standard you can certify against.
As there were already some fundamentals present, I could build on existing knowledge. I was quite familiar with Configuration Management and Change Management in the past, so that was an easy entry. Even though I was always more on the deployment and operational side of things, getting thrown back to the roots of Service Design and Service Architecture was an interesting refresher. A book I bought to go alongside (Making sense of ITILV2, ITILV3 & ISO20k) also introduced me to Service Oriented Architecture that could be transformed into Service Oriented Infrastructure by integrating ISO 20k correctly.
A big chunk of the standard dealt with management support and how top leadership must support the system and communicate it across the organization to make things a success. I witnessed the criticality of that just recently when I implemented a Ticketing System (osTicket) and had to beg management for literally every penny - not good. Eventually, it got done but then abandoned. ISO nails that down by stating that this is critical, or you can just leave the endeavor altogether.
Nevertheless, I was surprised to find that the structure of 20k was very strongly oriented on what I also saw in 27k1; ISO management systems now all seem to use something called ‘Annex SL,’ which is a high-level template all management systems, from 9k1 Quality up to 30k Risk, are oriented.
Learning for that cert took me a combined 10-15 hours; it’s quite a small one. Also, the ISO standard documentation is really thin, only 30 pages. I would have imagined that to be bigger, but apparently, they manage with just that. Anyway, I passed with 90%+ in about 50 minutes with 10 left, so that worked out for me.
