Practice might be a new term for some of the ITSM professionals, so let’s try to understand what ‘Practice’ really means?
Literally, ‘Practice’ means ‘Translating an idea into action or Knowledge of how something is done’ but what does it mean in ITIL 4?
Practice in ITIL 4 means the ‘Set of organizational resources designed for performing work or accomplishing an objective’.
Did you understand it? Ok, let me try to explain it more in detail… It is the combination of process, people and their skills, and tools that helps in IT service value co-creation.
ITIL® 4 has 34 practices in total, and they are classified into three types as General management practices, Service management practices, and Technical management practices.
General management practices are those which come from general business management domains that have been adopted and adapted for service management. There are 14 general management practices defined in ITIL®4.
Service management practices are those practices have been developed in service management
and ITSM industries. There are 17 service management practices defined in ITIL®4.
Technical management practices are those practices which come from technology management domains for service management purposes. There are 3 technical management practices
| General management practices | Service management practices | Technical management practices |
| Architecture management | Availability management | Deployment management |
| Continual Improvement | Business Analysis | Infrastructure & platform management |
| Information security management | Capacity & Performance management | Software development and management |
| Knowledge management | Change control | |
| Measurement and reporting | Incident management | |
| Organizational change management | IT Asset management | |
| Portfolio management | Monitoring & event management | |
| Project management | Problem management | |
| Relationship management | Release management | |
| Risk management | Service catalogue management | |
| Service Financial Management | Service configuration management | |
| Strategy management | Service continuity management | |
| Supplier management | Service Design | |
| Workforce & talent management | Service desk | |
| Service Level management | ||
| Service request management |
Note: In ITIL 4 foundation training, only 19 practices are applicable for knowledge evaluation.
GENERAL MANAGEMENT PRACTICES
Architecture management: This practice provides an understanding of all the different elements (business architecture, service architecture, information systems architecture, technology architecture, and environmental architecture) that make up an organization and how those elements interrelate, enabling the organization to effectively achieve its current and future objectives.
Continual improvement: This practice provides guidance on aligning the organization’s practices and services with changing business needs through the ongoing identification (all the improvement initiatives are registered in Continual Improvement Register) and improvement of services, service components, practices, or any element involved in the products and services.
Information Security Management: This practice provides guidance on protecting the information (which includes confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information, as well as other aspects of information security such as authentication and non-repudiation) needed by the organization to conduct its business.
Knowledge Management: This practice provides guidance on maintaining and improving the effective, efficient, and convenient use of information and knowledge across the organization.
Measurement and Reporting: This practice provides guidance on good decision-making and continual improvement by decreasing the levels of uncertainty.
Organizational change management: This practice provides guidance on managing the human aspects of the changes.
Portfolio management: This practice provides guidance on ensuring that the organization has the right mix of programmes, projects, products, and services to execute the organization’s strategy within its funding and resource constraints.
Project management: This practice provides guidance on ensuring that all projects in the organization are successfully delivered. This is achieved by planning, delegating, monitoring, and maintaining control of all aspects of a project, and keeping the motivation of the people involved.
Relationship management: This practice provides guidance on establishing and nurturing the links between the organization and its stakeholders at strategic and tactical levels.
Risk management: This practice provides guidance on ensuring that the organization understands and effectively handles risks.
Service financial management: This practice provides guidance on supporting 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: This practice provides guidance to formulate the goals of the organization and adopt the courses of action and allocation of resources necessary for achieving those goals.
Supplier management: This practice provides guidance 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: This practice provides guidance 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: This practice provides guidance to ensure that services deliver agreed levels of availability to meet the needs of customers and users.
Business analysis: This practice provides guidance to analyse 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.
Capacity and Performance management: This practice provides guidance to ensure that services achieve agreed and expected performance, satisfying current and future demand in a cost-effective way.
Change control: This practice provides guidance to maximize the number of successful IT changes by ensuring that risks have been properly assessed, authorizing changes to proceed, and managing the change schedule.
Incident management: This practice provides guidance to minimize the negative impact of incidents by restoring normal service operation as quickly as possible.
IT Asset management: This practice provides guidance to plan and manage the full lifecycle of all IT assets, to maximize value, control costs, manage risks, support decision-making about purchase, re-use, and retirement of assets, meet regulatory and contractual requirements.
Monitoring and Event Management: This practice provides guidance to systematically observe services and service components, and record and report selected changes of state identified as events.
Problem management: This practice provides guidance to reduce the likelihood and impact of incidents by identifying actual and potential causes of incidents, and managing workarounds and known errors.
Release management: This practice provides guidance to make new and changed services and features available for use.
Service Catalogue management: This practice provides guidance 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.
Service Configuration management: This practice provides guidance 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.
Service Continuity management: This practice provides guidance to ensure that the availability and performance of a service is maintained at a sufficient level in the event of a disaster.
Service Design: This practice provides guidance to design products and services that are fit for purpose, fit for use, and that can be delivered by the organization and its ecosystem.
Service Desk: This practice provides guidance 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.
Service level management: This practice provides guidance to set clear business-based targets for service performance, so that the delivery of a service can be properly assessed, monitored, and managed against these targets.
Service request management: This practice provides guidance 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: This practice provides guidance to ensure that new or changed products and services meet defined requirements.
TECHNICAL MANAGEMENT PRACTICES
Deployment management: This practice provides guidance to move new or changed hardware, software, documentation, processes, or any other component to live environments.
Infrastructure and platform management: This practice provides guidance to oversee the infrastructure and platforms used by an organization.
Software development and management: This practice provides guidance to ensure that applications meet internal and external stakeholder needs, in terms of functionality, reliability, maintainability, compliance, and auditability.
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