Hi,
I am 28 years old. I did my MCA(2004). presently I am working as a tech support coordinator, my responsibilities is managing service desk activities(CA service desk), managing SLA, maintaining MIS, making work load analysis and giving quality presentations. I was imposed to do CCNA so I did CCNA but I am not interested in technical side. I am interested in management side. I got the advice from my manager, he said go and do ITIL, once you done it you can get more opportunities but the problem is whether I choose the technical side or management side. I have "2+ years" of experience in IT field and also I have good knowledge in software engineering and testing concepts. Please suggest me to choose my career path. I really got confused lottttt.
My company provides "VOIP" services
please give me a solution...
sainath's Advice on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 :
Firstly,the goal of this career forum is to provide recommendations based on the input received on a case-to-case basis and not to provide solutions. The reason why I say this is because it is observed that many candidates tend to be highly confused, emotionally charged and want someone else to give them a quick-fix,silver bullet solution. This is a wrong approach - the more you emotionalize it, the worser your decisions will become. So please calm down.
Coming to the specifics of your question, your manager is right. ITIL is all about service delivery and your current job, from the description you have given is pure service delivery. You have the following advantages:
- You already handle a service desk ( CA,HP OVSC,Remedy are all advanced tools meant to implement ITIL practices). And CA is one of the best
- Your MIS reports will most probably be trying to measure some KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) of the Service Delivery measures agreed upon.
You may not realise it, but with this background you are well-placed to clear the ITIL Foundation without much hassle.
In the long-term, using this background you can look to become a Service Delivery Manager (SDM). This is a key post and has huge responsibility, career prospects and financial rewards associated with it. Right now infrastructure outsourcing is picking up in India strongly. Look around and you will see every other company outsourcing it's application development and service delivery (broadly - application maintenance and infrastructure maintenance) to 3rd parties. For a client company outsourcing it's IT function, the SDM of the vendor company is the most important person. The primary job of the SDM is to generate tangible and measureable business value for the client organisation - however, this is not an easy task as value is hard to capture and deliver. The ITIL framework version 3 primarily targets this.
Post clearing the foundation,you should move on to clear the intermediate exams in ITIL in various disciplines. This will give you the requisite knowledge and help you to stake your claim for better roles. The ITIL core guidance is very comprehensive and apart from service delivery you will also become better at general management once you have read and understood the same. But you should not stop only at Foundation level.
Though ITIL is not about being technical, I personally don't think that you will succeed in the long term if you are a pure manager who basically does not understand technology. Most such managers are usually dependent heavily on their subordinates and end up becoming status experts. The trick is to know enough i.e. you need to know enough about a technology so that you can confortably take decisions - a key responsibility of managers. I will put it this way - you do not need to know everything, but you need to know enough of the right things.
All the best !
Regards,
Sainath Sherigar,
www.ugain.info
Giri said on Thursday, October 22, 2009
First of all, Thanks a lot to spent your valuable time to write this suggestion. Recommendations was very clear and useful to my career goal. Now I got cleared and also started to learn about the concepts of VOIP :). I will clear my ITIL examination shortly.
Hats off to you. Thanks a lot once again :)