At first glance, today’s course appears to be the version 3 equivalent to the previous version 2 course, with them both being the first ITIL course you take and there being a multiple choice exam at the end. After only one day it is clear that they are quite different beasts, but you don’t have to go beyond the name of the course to find out why.

The service management essentials training six years ago was a an overview of ITIL in addition to a description and practical simulations of supporting a service through the service desk, incident management and problem management. I felt that this was useful training as everyone would have a more practical understanding of service management.

The v3 foundation certificate has been, and appears like it will be, about rote learning the ITIL terminology in order to pass the exam. There will be a simulation, but instead of multiple runs of it being spread out during the course, it will be run on the last day, after the exam. Instead of the simulation being used as a learning tool, it appears to be a tacked on afterthought to try and convey some practical knowledge out of the training.

Oh well, there is nothing I can do about the form of training except to attend it. I only hope that after spending all that money on training every ICT related staff member, that we can directly apply this new terminology.

We had been led to believe that the course would be about practical methods to construct the forms in a usable manner. However, that was only one part of the training. The focus of the course was on the entire form process, starting from why you even need to ask for information.

Because of this, the course was even better than I expected as I believe that most of the problems we have at work stem from a lack of suitable analysis and design. Too often we are implementing solutions in need of a problem. Instead, we should be understanding the problem and then considering possible solutions, including not doing anything.

Today was my first of four days with Damian Conway. Today was the first day of Advanced Module Interface Techniques and so far he as led us through the design and some of the implementation of ‘magic’ (aka sufficiently advanced technology) modules such as Perl6::Say (stunningly simple) and Contextual::Return (simple to use, mind bending to understand the implementation).

Tomorrow will be the second day of this course which is then followed by The Productive Programmer and Advanced Technical Presentation Techniques (one day each).

Damian will also be giving his “Fun with Dead Languages” talk at Melbourne Perl Mongers this Wednesday…

I would say that it was more worth it than the Project Management: Essential Techniques workshop that I went on last November as it was about how to do the analysis part of a project, in particular the documenting of existing processes, rather that how to run the project as a whole which isn’t where we really fall down.

Of even more signifigance was the reaction of Nathan and Emily, two managers, to the concepts…

So far most of what we had been arguing over at work for at least the last six months was ratified by Damian.

The best thing about Damian’s courses is that we can delve deep down into some very elegant and powerfull constructs that have practical applications. Right now I want to write a class that uses a closure to implement a flyweight pattern in order to enforce data encapsulation…

I also want to do his Advanced Module Development Techniques, or as Damian referred to it "Scary Perl", course…

Above all it has given me a lot to think about regarding how the ITSM framework could work together with Thomsett project management…

• Almost all of the team has done the course so why don’t we appear to be using any of it?
• It brings up some questions reagarding the structure of our team. The client relations team is really anything that isn’t code, ie helpdesk, interfaces, testing, marketing, project management, etc. Doesn’t really fit with Thomsett’s seperation of management (left bubble) and tech issues (right bubble).
• During the course I recalled that Mythical Man Month, Pragmatic Programmer and Peopleware all talk about some of the Thomsett concepts.
• Mostly it just makes common sense. So why don’t we do it?

Earlier this week I finished reading XP Refactored and one of the final comments was about how Kent Beck said that Extreme Programming is about turning all the dials, on various development practices, to 10. The comment in question (I can’t seem to find it now) said something about how anyone who has a sound system at home knows what happens when you turn everything up to full…

The relevant point I am now getting around to making is regarding the Thomsett success sliders; aspects of the project (client satisfaction, objectives, budget, on time, add value, quality, team satisfaction) are assigned a value that indicates how flexible they are. ie if the slider is fully on for time then it must meet whatever deadline, but it the slider for budget is half off then there is a fair amount of flexibility there. The important thing is that no two sliders can be on the same value (regular spacing from off to on) because you can’t have everything fully on. This concept replaces the old theory of you can have any two of quality, time or budget.

The point I’m still trying to make is that XP says everthing should be on. As other people’s experience is telling us, that will not just work…

A some stage we need to do his Perl Best Practice course, assuming he has finished planning it…

The course also brought back memories of having Damian as my lecturer for a couple of subjects back in my early years of university. His Object Oriented Perl book also brings back memories of similar concepts, except in C++ back then. I must finish reading it a some stage…