ITIL is the world’s leading ITSM reference. As long as organizations seek to improve customer experience, service delivery, and business alignment, there remains a need for ITIL.
When adopting ITIL, the biggest piece of advice is to avoid a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. Instead, there needs to be a change in culture and mindset for dealing with customers and people involved in the service lifecycle. Remember that ITIL is a framework of guidance, but everything you do with ITIL and ITSM is about cultural transformation.
Following ITIL best practices provide the fastest route to realizing value in an organization’s ITIL adoption.
ITIL Guiding Principles
The updated ITIL guidance now includes the ITIL guiding principles. These 7 principles outline the core ideas of ITIL and support service management regardless of industry, size, or approach. These recommendations are universal, so adopting them to your organization’s ITSM framework offers a quick and easy route to benefit from ITIL.
It is also good to note that the ITIL guiding principles are shared in other frameworks such as Agile, DevOps, and Lean, so an understanding of these basic practices can facilitate the adoption of new processes further down the line.
The Continual Improvement Model
Continual improvement is one of the defining features of ITIL. In ITIL v4, the concept was revamped into a 7-step model. The model is iterative in nature and allows for critical judgement of each step with an option to re-evaluate and go back if needed.
The continual improvement model is very useful for any service management improvement initiative. It can target specific improvements in any of the following:
- Organizations and people
- Information and technology
- Partners and suppliers
- Value streams and processes.
The Service Value Chain approach
Popularized by Lean and Six Sigma, value streams have become a vital tool in modelling and understanding how your business realizes value via internal and external activities and processes. ITIL v4 embraces this concept with its introduction of the service value chain.
The ITIL 4 service value chain has six activities:
- Plan
- Improve
- Engage
- Design and transition
- Obtain/build
- Deliver and support
Visualizing the journey of ITSM activities through value stream helps improve customer experience. Using an outside-in perspective that seeks to maximize customer value, processes can be fine-tuned to minimize waste or inefficiencies, and remove delays.
The Management Practices guidance
ITIL 4 introducing flexibility with the brand-new Service Value System (SVS) and 34 management practices that apply across the whole value chain.
ITIL 4 defines a management practice as a set of organizational resources designed for performing work or accomplishing an objective. Like the continual improvement model, the SVS can consider any or all your organization’s four dimensions – people, technology, partners, and value streams.
While it might seem straightforward, changes to one aspect that are not thought-out can bring unforeseen negative impacts to customers at the tail-end of the value delivery activities. For example, an incident might be escalated through multiple teams rather than via swarming for faster identification of symptoms and determination of best team to handle it.