ITIL 4 Foundation Certification Notes: 7 ITIL Guiding Principles

[ITIL® 4 Foundation Study Notes] This chapter provides an overview of “how the ITIL® guiding principles can help an organization adopt and adapt service management” for ITIL® 4 Foundation Exam which accounts for 6 questions on the exam.

ITIL® 4 Foundation Exam Syllabus

7 ITIL® guiding principles

A guiding principle is a recommendation that guides an organization in all circumstances which allows it to integrate different working and management methods within service management of the organization.

• Focus on value – Everything the organization does should link back, directly or indirectly, to value for itself, its customers and other stakeholders
  • need to understand service consumers, their perception of value, map outcome to value and understand customer experience (CX – total functional and emotional interactions) and user experience (UX – just focus on usability and aesthetics)
  • needs to maintain a focus on value in day-to-day operations as well as improvement projects
• Start where you are – to understand the current situation thoroughly to consider if anything can be reused / built upon
  • make an inventory of current services, processes and methods and measure the performance in an objective way
• Progress iteratively with feedback – by organizing work into smaller, more manageable sections that can be executed and completed in a timely manner, the focus on each effort will be sharper and easier to maintain
  • feedback helps to understand value perception of stakeholders, demands, opportunities and risks
  • working iteratively allows more flexibility to respond to changes
  • going small and going fast
• Collaborate and promote visibility – working together with a shared goal to remove silos internally and externally
  • need to understand priorities, flow of work, bottlenecks, resources utilitization
  • use different communication methods/types to effectively communicate with different stakeholders
• Think and work holistically – nothing stands alone, the services/outputs need to work in an integrated way to handle activities of the organization as a whole to focus on the delivery of value
  • holistic thinking and working through collaboration and communication
• Keep it simple and practical – always use the minimum number of steps to accomplish an objective with outcome-based thinking
  • designed for the majority and create handling rules for exceptions
  • doing fewer things better for quick wins
• Optimize and automate – to make something as effective / useful as it needs to be through optimization first and use technology to perform steps consistently with little or no human intervention through automation
  • need to optimize iteratively and continually monitor the impact of optimisation/automation with a focus on value

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

This ITIL® 4 Foundation study note includes:

• an overview of the nature, use and interaction of all 7 ITIL® guiding principles