FAQ

FitSM has been developed for practitioners, managers and consultants seeking a lightweight solution for IT service management.

FitSM is and will remain free for everybody. This covers all parts of the standard, including the core parts (FitSM-0, -1, -2 and -3), the templates and samples (FitSM-4), the guides (FitSM-5) as well as the FitSM maturity assessment tool (FitSM-6). In addition, training material (such as slides / handouts) for each of the modules of the FitSM training and certification scheme can be accessed for free. All parts of the FitSM standard and related material published by the FitSM working group are licensed under a Creative Commons International License.

The key idea behind IT service management could be summarized like this: By following a service-oriented approach, an IT organisation (which may be everything from an internal IT department over a shared IT unit up to an external IT provider) is able to better understand what they do and offer, and how this is aligned to the needs of their customers and users. And by implementing IT service management processes, the activities carried out to plan, deliver, operate and control these services become more structured and repeatable, with clearly defined responsibilities. All this helps an IT organisation to increase their level of professionalism and organisational maturity.

Implementing IT service management in an organisation or federation is often considered a painful process connected to a lot of paperwork and bureaucracy as well as a significant increase in organisational complexity making day-to-day operations much more formalistic. In fact, to establish structured management processes and to achieve repeatable results from these processes, a certain amount of administrative overhead must be taken into account. However, as a lightweight approach FitSM has been designed to keep the amount of overhead limited to a reasonable level, so that even small and medium-sized organisations can take benefit from IT service management without having to suffer from an “over-engineered” process framework.

Yes. FitSM, ITIL, ISO/IEC 20000 and COBIT share some key ideas of how to manage and govern the provision of technology-enabled services. These key ideas or principles include aspects like process-orientation, customer focus, IT / business alignment, continual improvement and involvement of people. In addition, the understanding of which processes are recommended to implement effective IT service management is similar in the mentioned standards and frameworks. The FitSM process model is very close to the process model underlying ISO/IEC 20000, while ITIL and COBIT describe a larger number of IT service management and IT governance processes compared to FitSM and ISO/IEC 20000. However, starting with the more reduced and lightweight set of processes of FitSM can be considered a valid first step towards implementing the full set of processes recommended by other frameworks. Find out more: The FitSM process model compared

There are no plans to add additional processes to FitSM. Our core tenant is to keep FitSM “lightweight” and in order to do so, have to refrain from trying to cover too much, therefore we have specified as one of the 4 core principles of FitSM is “extendability”. In FitSM V3, we updated some of the terminology to continue to be compatible with updates to other standards and frameworks i.e. ITIL.

You are free to extend the scope of the SMS to explicitly cover specific needs or add process and still be compliant with the approach of FitSM. We prefer this than to try and anticipate or address every possible need and have a overly complex standard that is hard to implement.

Organisations (or federations) which are new to the topic of IT service management are likely to benefit most from FitSM, since FitSM offers them a lightweight and practical solution to managing their technology-enabled services in a more professional way. However, organisations who have already implemented IT service management and related processes, may also take benefit from FitSM even on a higher level of organisational maturity. A helpful first step to understand where you are could be to go through the FitSM-6 capability and maturity self assessment, which is based on a simple spreadsheet-based tool.

All available documents of the FitSM family of standards as well as the FitSM training material can be downloaded for free in the FitSM Downloads section of this website.

To give any training from the FitSM qualification scheme, you must comply with the following:

• You must hold the official certificate issued by an examination institute recognised by ITEMO e.V. of the module for which you will give a training.
• You must be listed as a trainer within a training organisation registered with an examination institute recognised by ITEMO e.V., which requires at least the following information to be provided:
  • Personal and contact data of the trainer(s)
  • Record or evidence of relevant training, education and experience of each trainer

Trainings and exams are subject to quality control mechanisms, and every trainer must commit to support and contribute to this process. ITEMO e.V. may monitor exam results and training / exam feedback, supervise trainings and exams and reserves the right to revoke trainer privileges.

Visit: https://www.fitsm.eu/contact-us/