ITIL 4 Foundation Certification Notes: 15 ITIL Practices

[ITIL® 4 Foundation Study Notes] This chapter provides an overview of “15 ITIL® Practices” for ITIL® 4 Foundation Exam which accounts for 24 questions on the exam.

ITIL® 4 Foundation Exam Syllabus

ITIL® Definitions

• IT Asset – any financially valuable component that can contribute to the delivery of an IT product or service
• Event – any change of state that has significance for the management of a service or other configuration item, events are typically recognized through notifications created by an IT service, configuration item or monitoring tool
• Configuration Item – any component that needs to be managed in order to deliver an IT service
• Change – the addition, modification or removal of anything that could have a direct or indirect effect on IT services
• Incident – an unplanned interruption to or reduction in the quality of a service
• Problem – a cause, or potential cause, of one or more incidents, requiring investigation and analysis to identify the causes, develop workarounds and recommend longer-term resolution
• Known Error – a problem that has been analyzed but not yet resolved

15 ITIL® Practices

ITIL® Practice  – a set of organizational resources designed for performing work or accomplishing an objective enabled with resources from 4 dimensions of service management

There are in total 34 ITIL® practices:

• 14 general management practices – adopted and adapted for service management from business management
• 17 service management practices – developed in service management and IT service management
• 3 technical management practices – adopted and adapted for service management from technology management

Only the following 15 ITIL® practices are required for the ITIL® 4 Foundation Exam, the first 8 practices would require only an awareness:

• Information Security Management – to protect the information needed by the organization to conduct its business
  • including understanding and managing risks to the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information, as well as other aspects of information security such as authentication and non-repudiation
• Relationship Management – to establish and nurture the relationships between the organization and its stakeholders at strategic and tactical levels
  • including identification, analysis, monitoring and continual improvement of relationships with and between stakeholders
• Supplier Management – to ensure the organization’s suppliers and their performances are managed appropriately to support the seamless provision of quality products and services
  • including creating closer, more collaborative relationships with key suppliers to uncover and realize new value and reduce the risk of failure
• IT Asset Management – to plan and manage the full lifecycle of all IT assets to help the organization to maximize value, control costs, manage risks, support decision making about purchase, re-use, retirement and disposal of assets and meet regulatory and contractual requirements
• Monitoring and Event Management – to systematically observe services and service components, and record and report selected changes of state identified as events
  • including identifying and prioritizing infrastructure, services, business processes and information security events and establishes the appropriate response to those events
• Release Management – to make new and changed services and features available for use
• Service Configuration Management – to ensure accurate and reliable information about the configuration of services and the configuration items that support them, is available when and where it is needed
  • including information on how configuration items are configured and the relationships between them
• Deployment Management – to move new or changed hardware, software, documentation, processes or any other component to live/staging/testing environments

The following 7 practices are required to be studied in more depth as 17 questions will be asked on these topics:

• Continual Improvement – 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
  • improvement opportunities are to be documented in the continual improvement register (CIR) which allows improvement ideas to be logged, prioritised, tracked and managed
  • continual improvement at all levels of the organization by all staff, even suppliers and partners will need to contribute (often included in contracts)
  • activities include:
    • Encouraging continual improvement across the organisation
    • Securing time and budget for continual improvement
    • Identifying and logging improvement opportunities
    • Assessing and prioritising improvement opportunities
    • Making business cases for improvement action
    • Planning and implementing improvements
    • Measuring and evaluating improvement results
    • Coordinating improvement activities across the organisation
  • continual improvement model
    • What is the vision?
    • Where are we now?
    • Where do we want to be ?
    • How do we get there?
    • Take action
    • Did we get there?
    • How do we keep the momentum going?
• Change Control – 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
  • change authority to authorize changes
  • must balance delivering benefits through successful changes vs protecting live service from harmful changes
  • change types:
    • standard changes – low-risk, preauthorised changes
    • normal changes – need to be scheduled, assessed and authorized, may be low-risk or high-risk
    • emergency changes – need to be implemented as soon as possible, some steps may be ignored, may need a separate change authority
• Incident Management – to minimize the negative impact of incidents by restoring normal service operation as quickly as possible
  • incidents need to be logged, prioritised, and resolved within agreed timescales
  • may need escalation
  • activities include:
    • design the incident management practice (e.g. swarming – a group of stakeholders work together until it is clear who is best to continue with the incident)
    • prioritise incidents
    • use an incident management tool
• Problem Management – to reduce the likelihood and impact of incidents by identifying actual and potential causes of incidents and managing workarounds and known errors
  • 3 phases of problem management
    • problem identification – problem logging
    • problem control – problem aanlysis, documenting workarounds/known errors
    • error control – identify permanent solutions, reassessment of errors, improvement of workarounds
• Service Request Management – 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 requests are part of normal service delivery (not incidents)
  • should be automated and standardised as much as possible
• Service Desk – to capture demand for incident resolution and service requests. It should also be the entry point and single point of contact for the service provider with all of its users
  • Acknowledge > Classify > Own > Act
  • e.g. telephone, live chat, email, forum, messaging
  • skills required: empathy, emotional intelligence, effective communication, customer service skills
• Service Level Management – to set clear business-based targets for service levels, and to ensure that delivery of services is properly assessed, monitored, and managed against those targets
  • service level is a measure of service quality
  • service level agreement (SLA) is a document of agreement of the service performance from the customer’s point of view
  • establishes service level, monitors and analyzes performance, performs service reviews and identifies improvement opportunities
  • collect information from: business metrics, operational metrics, customer feedback and customer engagement

Conclusion: What’s needed for the ITIL® 4 Foundation Exam

This ITIL® 4 Foundation study note includes:

• an overview of the 15 ITIL® Practices by understanding the purposes and key terms:
  • Information Security Management
  • Relationship Management
  • Supplier Management
  • IT Asset Management
  • Monitoring and Event Management
  • Release Management
  • Service Configuration Management
  • Deployment Management
  • Continual Improvement
  • Change Control
  • Incident Management
  • Problem Management
  • Service Request Management
  • Service Desk
  • Service Level Management