Anybody work with ITIL?  If so, any links to good resources would be exceptionally helpful.  I have 11 days to get a decent, basic knowledge of what it is and how to implement.

Thank you,
Gooser

I believe it's a set of principles used by some organizations to govern how their I.T. departments work. Google ITIL and you'll find lots of ideas.

The only time I heard about it was in the '90's when I went for an interview. It kind of sounded like a best practices kind of thing.  

Yeah, it's a much loved qualification that shows you know how to tick boxes and fill in forms, much loved my senior managers, along with Pie Charts and performance reviews .
/cynicism mode off.

Robert Wilensky:
We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

 

Don't forget it's loved by training companies that sell ITIL certification training.

Jeff
It's never too early to begin preparing for International Talk Like a Pirate Day
"The software I buy sucks,  The software I write sucks.  It's time to give up and have a beer..." - Me

ITIL was heavily pushed at the last company I worked for.  Like the cynicism that others have shown, to me it really seemed like a joke to spend a lot of time training employees to act with common sense.  

But I can tell you this.  After I transitioned to a smaller company (actually a hospital) with a younger, less-seasoned I.T. department growing at a very fast pace, I immediately realized how having the core ITIL values in place would have been helpful.  Processes were (and to some degree still are) in disarray.  Asking two members of the same team how to push a major change out to the environment will likely lead you to two very different answers.  ITIL also helps to define points of contact on a variety of levels that helps keep your non-technical staff in check, including directors and managers that feel the need of being treated like a VP in every instance.

So on some levels, I can see how's it a waste of time.  On others, it really just depends on your environment.  If you have well-defined procedures already, then it's probably IT management looking to score brownie points with executives in your company.  However, if you're in a situation similar to the one I stepped into years ago, it might actually be beneficial.

~cdogg
"All generalizations are false, including this one." - Mark Twain
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