By ITIL 5 Master – Jacqueline (Jaqi) Haworth
Today I became an ITIL V5 Master, adding to my V4 Master, V3 Expert and V2 Manager certifications. I’m genuinely proud of that. Little did I realize when I took my ITIL V2 Foundation 20 years ago that ITIL would become a thread running through so much of my career — shaping how I train others, advise organizations, lead teams, solve problems and challenge my own thinking.
The certificates, though, are probably the least interesting part. Passing an exam and applying what you learn are very different things.
– You can know every definition and still design a terrible process.
– You can meet every SLA and still provide a poor customer experience.
– You can implement an expensive ITSM platform and simply automate your problems.
The Value of a Framework
A framework is only useful if you use it to make things better.
ITIL has evolved enormously over those 20 years. V2 gave us process discipline and structure. V3 taught us to think about the service lifecycle. ITIL 4 shifted the conversation from following processes to creating value. And Version 5 evolves again for a world of digital products, experience, transformation, automation and AI.
Three Things from Version 5 that Stand Out For Me
- Understand the value stream first. Improve it second. Automate it third.
If the process is poor, automation can simply make a bad process run faster. - Customers don’t care about our organizational chart or how green our SLA report is.
They care whether the service works, whether someone takes ownership when it doesn’t, and what the overall experience feels like. - AI doesn’t fix bad foundations.
Before asking “How can we use AI?” we should ask what problem we are solving, whether we can trust the data and knowledge, who remains accountable, and how we will know it actually improved the outcome. AI still needs good data, governance, knowledge, value streams and people who understand what they are trying to achieve.
Passing the exam is only the start.
After many years of teaching ITSM frameworks, one lesson has stuck with me. The real value comes when you go back to work and use what you learned to simplify something, remove waste, improve an experience, challenge a poor metric or question something being done simply because “we’ve always done it that way.”
Remember, a qualification is a milestone. It’s not the destination. It’s the beginning of your journey.