ITIL4 -What is it?

Lee Healey
May 13
4 min read

🔧 ITIL 4 Practices and Guiding Principles: Full Overview

ITIL 4 introduces a comprehensive framework that includes 34 management practices, each helping organisations deliver IT services aligned with business goals. These practices are grouped into three categories:

• General Management Practices (14)

• Service Management Practices (17)

• Technical Management Practices (3)

Alongside, ITIL 4 provides 7 Guiding Principles that serve as universal recommendations to guide behaviours and decisions across all areas of service management.

🧩 1. General Management Practices (14)

These practices are borrowed or adapted from general business management disciplines.

Practice	Description	Example
Architecture Management	Ensures the logical design and evolution of systems and services.	Designing cloud architecture to support a new digital platform.
Continual Improvement	Aligns improvements with business goals.	Running monthly retrospectives to identify service improvements.
Information Security Management	Protects data confidentiality, integrity, and availability.	Implementing ISO 27001 controls for access management.
Knowledge Management	Ensures valuable information is available and accessible.	Creating a searchable knowledge base for service desk agents.
Measurement and Reporting	Supports decision-making with meaningful data.	Publishing monthly KPIs on incident response times.
Organisational Change Management	Prepares and supports individuals for changes.	Communicating and training users before rolling out new tools.
Portfolio Management	Ensures investments align with business strategy.	Prioritising service upgrades that support key business goals.
Project Management	Plans and controls project delivery.	Delivering a CRM implementation using agile methodology.
Relationship Management	Builds positive relationships with stakeholders.	Account managers conducting quarterly business reviews.
Risk Management	Identifies and manages risks.	Using a risk register during a data centre migration.
Service Financial Management	Manages budgeting, accounting, and charging.	Forecasting IT budget requirements for cloud subscriptions.
Strategy Management	Formulates and maintains strategy across services.	Defining a 3-year digital transformation strategy.
Supplier Management	Ensures value from third-party vendors.	Conducting performance reviews with hosting providers.
Workforce and Talent Management	Develops and retains IT talent.	Building skills matrices and succession planning.

🔧 2. Service Management Practices (17)

These practices are core to the planning, delivery, and support of IT services.

Practice	Description	Example
Availability Management	Ensures services meet availability needs.	Designing systems with failover to achieve 99.9% uptime.
Business Analysis	Analyzes business needs and defines solutions.	Gathering user stories to build a self-service portal.
Capacity and Performance Management	Balances resources with demand.	Monitoring CPU usage to plan server upgrades.
Change Enablement	Minimizes risk when implementing changes.	Using CABs for approving major IT changes.
Incident Management	Restores normal service quickly.	Resolving printer issues via the service desk.
IT Asset Management	Manages lifecycle of hardware/software assets.	Tracking laptops through procurement, use, and disposal.
Monitoring and Event Management	Detects and responds to system events.	Using dashboards to track server outages.
Problem Management	Prevents recurring incidents.	Root cause analysis of repeated email outages.
Release Management	Controls release of new features or fixes.	Coordinating app updates with internal stakeholders.
Service Catalogue Management	Maintains a single source of service information.	Publishing a catalog of available IT services.
Service Configuration Management	Maintains configuration item info.	Using CMDB to manage server dependencies.
Service Continuity Management	Ensures services can recover from disruptions.	Developing a disaster recovery plan.
Service Design	Designs new or changed services.	Designing a new IT onboarding process.
Service Desk	Provides a point of contact for users.	Logging and resolving tickets via phone or portal.
Service Level Management	Sets and monitors service targets.	Defining response times in an SLA.
Service Request Management	Handles routine service requests.	Processing user requests for software installation.
Service Validation and Testing	Ensures services meet requirements before release.	QA testing a new mobile app before go-live.

🛠 3. Technical Management Practices (3)

These practices provide the technical foundations that support service management.

Practice	Description	Example
Deployment Management	Moves changes into live environments.	Deploying new software via CI/CD pipelines.
Infrastructure and Platform Management	Oversees physical and virtual infrastructure.	Managing a hybrid data center and cloud setup.
Software Development and Management	Manages the software development lifecycle.	Agile sprint planning and feature releases.

🌟 ITIL 4 Guiding Principles (7)

These principles apply universally across all practices and projects, ensuring an adaptive, value-driven approach.

Guiding Principle	Description	Example
1. Focus on Value	Everything should create or support value for stakeholders.	Prioritizing features based on customer feedback.
2. Start Where You Are	Assess the current state and build upon it.	Reusing existing monitoring tools instead of buying new ones.
3. Progress Iteratively with Feedback	Break work into manageable chunks and learn from each.	Using short sprint cycles with user demos.
4. Collaborate and Promote Visibility	Work together and share knowledge across teams.	Holding cross-team workshops to plan service changes.
5. Think and Work Holistically	Consider all parts of the organization as an interconnected whole.	Aligning IT change with HR onboarding processes.
6. Keep It Simple and Practical	Use only what’s necessary; eliminate waste.	Avoiding overcomplicated workflows in the ticketing system.
7. Optimize and Automate	Streamline before introducing automation.	Simplifying approval steps before automating request fulfillment.

✅ Final Thoughts

ITIL 4 gives organisations a modern, adaptable approach to managing IT services by combining practical, categorised practices with universal guiding principles. When used together, these elements ensure services are not only efficient and reliable, but also continuously improving and aligned to business value.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Information Technology Service Management processes include a range of activities designed to deliver and support high-quality IT services for your business. These can include incident management, problem management, change management, and service-level management.

Additionally, ITSM involves continuous enhancement processes to improve service delivery, increase efficiency and reduce costs.

By adopting strong ITSM practices, your business can improve service quality, customer satisfaction and achieve greater alignment between IT and business objectives. This holistic approach ensures that IT services are effective and integrated with your overall business goals.

As ITSM focuses on aligning IT services with your business’s needs, you can ensure that IT processes and services support and enhance business operations. This is achieved through a structured approach to managing IT services, guided by best practices and methodologies such as ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library).

These models provide guidance on best practices for delivering and supporting technology and other enterprise services and can help companies align their capabilities with their business goals and strategic objectives.

We adhere to the ITIL Framework in delivering our ITSM consultancy services. ITIL is a globally recognised set of best practices for ITSM that helps businesses provide consistent, high-quality IT services.

By implementing ITIL processes and principles, we ensure that your IT operations are standardised, efficient and aligned with industry standards.

ITIL4 is the latest version of ITIL, designed to help enterprises navigate the new technological era known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

This version introduces a more flexible, modern approach to ITSM, emphasising its integration with other areas of business management.

Effective ITSM revolves around a number of processes. Whilst there are 34 practice areas in ITIL4, there are often a core set of practices that many of our clients are particularly interested in optimising. As understanding and implementing these processes can significantly enhance the performance and quality of IT services within your organisation.

Incident Management

Restores all service operations back to normal as soon as possible, minimising to lessen the impact on your operations. This process might involve logging, categorising, prioritising, and resolving incidents, ensuring which can help mitigate disruption to users and the business.

Configuration Management

Keeps an updated record of IT infrastructure - hardware, software, and network components - in a centralised configuration management database (CMDB). This database provides accurate data on configuration items (CIs) and their relationships.

Change Management

Ensures any changes to your IT services are controlled and coordinated. This process evaluates the impact of changes, approving them through a structured workflow, and ensuring successful implementation with minimal risk.

Service level Management

Defines, negotiates, and monitors service level agreements (SLAs) between the service provider and the customer. This process ensures that agreed-upon service quality and performance levels are consistently met.

Asset Management

Tracks and manages your IT assets throughout their lifecycle to ensure efficient use and cost control. You maintain an accurate inventory of hardware, software, and other IT resources through this.

Problem Management

Identifies, analyses and resolves the root causes of incidents. Proactively addressing underlying issues can prevent recurring incidents. This, in turn, provides improved system stability and reduced downtime.

Request Management

Handles the lifecycle of user service requests, such as access to applications, software installations or information enquiries. It ensures requests are managed efficiently to provide a streamlined approach that fulfils user needs and enhances satisfaction.

Knowledge Management

Captures, organises and shares knowledge to improve efficiency and support decision-making. By leveraging a centralised knowledge base, your IT teams can quickly resolve incidents and problems, and end-users can find the right solutions to common issues.

Implementing the right ITSM strategy and optimising your tooling can provide a range of benefits for your company, including:

Improved Efficiency and Cost Savings By streamlining processes and automating routine tasks, ITSM can help your enterprise work more efficiently and reduce the time and resources required to deliver and support IT services. Good ITSM is a silent enabler of success across a range of organisational goals.

Improved Compliance and Risk Management ITSM can help you ensure that your IT systems and processes comply with industry regulations and standards. It also ensures that you are effectively managing risks associated with your IT operations. This can help you avoid costly disruptions and legal consequences.

Increased Productivity Effective ITSM practices can help your business prevent problems and fix them quickly if they do occur. This can help you lower costs—outages cost money—and increase productivity and employee satisfaction.

Better Customer Satisfaction You can improve customer satisfaction and build stronger relationships by delivering high-quality IT services that meet customers' needs.

Improved Service Quality ITSM ensures that IT services are delivered consistently and meet agreed-upon service levels, leading to higher customer satisfaction and better overall service quality.

Business Continuity ITSM processes like incident and problem management ensure that disruptions are minimised and services are quickly restored to ensure business continuity.

Strategic Alignment ITSM aligns IT services with business objectives, ensuring that technology initiatives support and drive business growth. This alignment helps you make informed decisions and prioritise projects that add the most value.

Enhanced Collaboration ITSM promotes a collaborative environment where IT teams can work together more effectively, sharing knowledge and best practices to improve your delivery of services.

Proactive problem-solving Through problem management and a proactive approach, ITSM helps your IT teams identify and address the root causes of incidents to prevent future issues and reduce downtime.

Continuous Improvement

ITSM encourages continuous monitoring and improvement of IT processes, allowing your IT teams to refine and enhance their service delivery regularly.

Better Resource Management With ITSM, IT teams can manage resources more effectively, ensuring that personnel, technology, and budget are allocated optimally to support business requirements.