ITIL Management Practices
In ITIL, a management practice is a set of organizational resources designed for performing work or accomplishing an objective.
- Categories:
- general management practices
- service management practices
- technical management practices
- 14 GM practices
- 17 SM practices
- 3 TM practices
High-velocity Service Delivery
- speed to market is a key success factor
- includes:
- focus on fast delivery of new and changed IT services to users
- continual analysis of feedback provided for IT services at every stage of their lifecycle
- agility in processing the feedback, giving rise to continual and fast improvement of IT services
- an end-to-end approach to the service lifecycle, from ideation, through creation and delivery, to consumption of services
- integration of produce and service management practices
- digitization of IT infrastructure and adoption of cloud computing
- extension automation of the service delivery chain
- influences all practices
General Management Practices
Architecture Management
The purpose of architecture management is to provide an understanding of all the different elements that make up an organization and how those elements interrelate, enabling the organization to effectively achieve its current and future objectives.
- types:
- business architecture
- service architecture
- gives view of all the services it provides, their structure and dynamics
- information system architecture
- describes the logical and physical data assets and the data management resources
- includes data and applications architecture
- technology architecture
- defines the software and hardware infrastructure needed to support the portfolio of products and services
- environmental architecture
- describes the external factors impacting the organization and the drivers for change, as well as all aspects, types, and levels of environmental control and their management
Continual Improvement
The purpose of the continual improvement practice is to align the organization’s practices and services with changing business needs through the ongoing improvement of products, services, and practices, or any element involved in the management of products and services.
- activities:
- encouraging continual improvement across the organization
- securing time and budget for continual improvement
- identifying and logging improvement opportunities
- assessing and prioritizing improvement opportunities
- making business cases for improvement action
- planning and implementing improvements
- measuring and evaluating improvement results
- coordinating improvement activities across the organization
Information Security Management
The purpose of the information security management practice is to protect the information needed by the organization to conduct its business.
- established by policies, processes, behaviors, risk management, and controls
- balance between:
- prevention
- detection
- correction
Knowledge Management
The purpose of the knowledge management practice is to maintain and improve the effective, efficient, and convenient use of information and knowledge across the organization.
Measurement and Reporting
The purpose of the measurement and reporting practice is to support good decision-making and continual improvement by decreasing the levels of uncertainty.
Organizational Change Management
The purpose of the organizational change management practice is to ensure that changes in an organization are smoothly and successfully implemented, and that lasting benefits are achieved by managing the human aspects of the changes.
Portfolio Management
The purpose of the portfolio management practice is to ensure that the organization has the right mix of programs, projects, products, and services to execute the organization’s strategy within its funding and resource constraints.
Project Management
The purpose of the project management practice is to ensure that all projects in the organization are successfully delivered.
Relationship Management
The purpose of the relationship management practice is to establish and nurture the links between the organization and its stakeholders at strategic and tactical levels.
Risk Management
The purpose of the risk management practice is to ensure that the organization understands and effectively handles risks.
Service Financial Management
The purpose of the service financial management practice is to support the organization’s strategies and plans for service management by ensuring that the organization’s financial resources and investments are being used effectively.
Strategy Management
The purpose of the strategy management practice is to formulate the goals of the organization and adopt the courses of action and allocation of resources necessary for achieving those goals.
Supplier Management
The purpose of the supplier management practice is to ensure that the organization’s suppliers and their performances are managed appropriately to support the seamless provision of quality products and services.
Workforce and Talent Management
The purpose of the workforce and talent management practice is to ensure that the organization has the right people with the appropriate skills and knowledge and in the correct roles to support its business objectives.
Service Management Practices
Availability Management
The purpose of the availability management practice is to ensure that services deliver agreed levels of availability to meet the needs of customers and users.
- activities:
- negotiating and agreeing achievable targets for availability
- designing infrastructure and applications that can deliver required availability levels
- ensuring that services and components are able to collect the data required to measure availability
- monitoring, analyzing, and reporting on availability
- planning improvements to availability
Business Analysis
The purpose of the business analysis practice is to analyze a business or some element of it, define its associated needs, and recommend solutions to address these needs and/or solve a business problem, which must facilitate value creation for stakeholders.
- activities:
- analyzing business systems, business processes, services, or architectures in the changing internal and external context
- identifying and prioritizing parts of the SVS, and products and services that require improvement, as well as opportunities for innovation
- evaluating and proposing actions that can be taken to create the desired improvement. Actions may include not only IT system changes, but also process changes, alterations to organizational structure, and staff development
- documenting the business requirements for the supporting services to enable the desired improvements
- recommending solutions following analysis of the gathered requirements and validating these with stakeholders
- 3 subprocesses:
- designing services for availability
- availability testing
- availability monitoring and reporting
Capacity and Performance Management
The purpose of the capacity and performance management practice is to ensure that services achieve agreed and expected performance, satisfying current and future demand in a cost-effective way.
Change Enablement
The purpose of the change enablement practice is to maximize the number of successful service and product changes by ensuring that risks have been properly assessed, authorizing changes to proceed, and managing the change schedule.
- standard changes
- low-risk, pre-authorized changes that are well understood and fully documented
- normal changes
- changes that need to be scheduled, assessed, and authorized following a process
- emergency changes
- changes that must be implemented as soon as possible
Incident Management
The purpose of the incident management practice is to minimize the negative impact of incidents by restoring normal service operation as quickly as possible.
Incident is an unplanned interruption to a service or reduction in the quality of a service.
- every incident is a problem
IT Asset Management
The purpose of the IT asset management practice is to plan and manage the full lifecycle of all IT assets, to help the organization:
-
maximize value
-
control costs
-
manage risks
-
support decision-making about purchase, re-use, retirement, and disposal of assets
-
meet regulatory and contractual requirements
-
types:
- IT asset management (ITAM)
- Software asset management (SAM)
Monitoring and Event Management
The purpose of the monitoring and event management practice is to systematically observe services and service components, and record and report selected changes of state identified as events.
Event is any change of state that has significance for the management of a service or other configuration item (CI).
Problem Management
The purpose of the problem management practice is to reduce the likelihood and impact of incidents by identifying actual and potential causes of incidents, and managing workarounds and known errors.
Problem is a cause, or potential cause, of one or more incidents.
- not every problem is an incident
Known error is a problem that has been analyzed but has not been resolved.
Phases of Problem Management:
- Problem identification → Problem control → Error control
Release Management
The purpose of the release management practice is to make new and changed services and features available for use.
Release is a version of a service or other configuration item, or a collection of configuration items, that is made available for use.
Service Catalogue Management
The purpose of the service catalogue management practice is to provide a single source of consistent information on all services and service offerings, and to ensure that it is available to the relevant audience.
Request catalogue is a view of the service catalogue, providing details on service requests for existing and new services, which is made available for the user.
Service Configuration Management
The purpose of the service configuration management practice is to ensure that accurate and reliable information about the configuration of services, and the CIs that support them, is available when and where it is needed.
Configuration item (CI) is any component that needs to be managed in order to deliver an IT service.
Service Continuity Management
The purpose of the service continuity management practice is to ensure that the availability and performance of a service are maintained at sufficient levels in case of a disaster.
- supports business continuity management (BCM)
- business impact analysis (BIA)
- recovery time objective (RTO)
- recovery point objective (RPO)
- disaster recovery plans (DRP)
Service Design
The purpose of the service design practice is to design products and services that are fit for purpose, fit for use, and that can be delivered by the organization and its ecosystem.
- customer experience (CX)
- user experience (UX)
- design thinking
Service Desk
The purpose of the service desk practice is to capture demand for incident resolution and service requests.
- entry point and single point of contact for the service provider with all of its users
Service Level Management
The purpose of the service level management practice is to set clear business-based targets for service levels, and to ensure that delivery of services is properly assessed, monitored, and managed against these targets.
Service level is one or more metrics that define expected or achieved service quality.
Service level agreement is a documented agreement between a service provider and customer that identifies both services required and the expected level of service.
- requirements:
- be related to a defined service in the catalogue
- related to defined outcomes and not simply operational metrics
- should reflect an agreement
Service Request Management
The purpose of the service request management practice is to support the agreed quality of a service by handling all pre-defined, user-initiated service requests in an effective and user-friendly manner.
Service Validation and Testing
The purpose of the service validation and testing practice is to ensure that new or changed products and services meet defined requirements.
Service validation focuses on establishing deployment and release management acceptance criteria (conditions that must be met for production readiness), which are verified through testing.
A test strategy defines an overall approach to testing.
- types of tests:
- utility/functionality tests:
- unit test
- test of a single system component
- system test
- overall testing of the system, including software and platforms
- integration test
- testing a group of dependent software modules together
- regression test
- testing whether previously working functions were impacted
- unit test
- warranty/non-functional tests:
- performance and capacity test
- checking speed and capacity under load
- security test
- testing vulnerability, policy compliance, penetration, and denial of service risk
- compliance test
- checking that legal and regulatory requirements have been met
- operational test
- testing for backup, event monitoring, failover, recovery, and reporting
- warranty requirements test
- checking for verification of necessary documentation, training, support model definition, and knowledge transfer
- user acceptance test
- test performed by users of a new or changed system to approve a release
- performance and capacity test
- utility/functionality tests:
Technical Management Practices
Deployment Management
The purpose of the deployment management practice is to move new or changed hardware, software, documentation, processes, or any other component to live environments.
Infrastructure and Platform Management
The purpose of the infrastructure and platform management practice is to oversee the infrastructure and platforms used by an organization.
Software Development and Management
The purpose of the software development and management practice is to ensure that applications meet internal and external stakeholder needs, in terms of functionality, reliability, maintainability, compliance, and auditability.