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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
The ITIL® 4 Essentials guide offers a comprehensive introduction to IT service management, focusing on ITIL® 4 practices and principles. Readers gain an understanding of the four dimensions of service management—organizations, people, information, technology, partners, and suppliers—which are key to delivering effective IT services.
The guide highlights ITIL® 4’s seven guiding principles, such as focusing on value, collaborating, and working holistically. These principles are essential for creating effective service management strategies. Readers will learn how to integrate these principles into their daily operations, leading to enhanced service delivery and better alignment with business goals. Additionally, the book explores the importance of the Service Value System (SVS) and the Service Value Chain, offering a detailed look at how these frameworks drive continuous improvement and value creation.
Lastly, the book covers essential ITIL® 4 practices like continual improvement, change management, and incident management. Each practice is explored in depth, providing practical guidance for implementation. The final chapters offer exam preparation tips, ensuring readers are ready for the ITIL® Foundation exam, with sample questions and strategies for success.
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Seitenzahl: 180
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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ITIL® 4 Essentials
Your essential guide for the ITIL 4 Foundation exam and beyond
Second edition
ITIL® 4 Essentials
Your essential guide for the ITIL 4 Foundation exam and beyond
Second edition
CLAIRE AGUTTER
Every possible effort has been made to ensure that the information contained in this book is accurate at the time of going to press, and the publisher and the author cannot accept responsibility for any errors or omissions, however caused. Any opinions expressed in this book are those of the author, not the publisher. Websites identified are for reference only, not endorsement, and any website visits are at the reader’s own risk. No responsibility for loss or damage occasioned to any person acting, or refraining from action, as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by the publisher or the author.
ITIL® is a registered trade mark of AXELOS Limited. All rights reserved.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publisher at the following address:
IT Governance Publishing Ltd
Unit 3, Clive Court
Bartholomew’s Walk
Cambridgeshire Business Park
Ely, Cambridgeshire
CB7 4EA
United Kingdom
www.itgovernancepublishing.co.uk
© Claire Agutter 2013, 2019, 2020.
The author has asserted the rights of the author under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
Formerly published as ITIL® Lifecycle Essentials – Your essential guide for the ITIL Foundation exam and beyond in 2013 by IT Governance Publishing.
First published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by IT Governance Publishing
ISBN 978-1-78778-160-3
Second edition published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by IT Governance Publishing
ISBN 978-1-78778-220-4
FOREWORD
Congratulations! You are now in possession of a book that will prove to be of great value to IT professionals at different stages in their IT service management journey: from the ITIL® greenhorns to the veterans looking to solidify their status.
ITIL 4 Essentials has been written with a delightfully refreshing approach, one that combines theoretical knowledge with practical know-how, arising from the author’s real-world experience. The author has also painstakingly marked out sections that are specific to the ITIL 4 Foundation certification exam as an easy reference for those who intend to attempt it.
Large volumes of theory can often be exhausting and at times uninteresting. One of the standout features in ITIL 4 Essentials is how the author overcomes this by encouraging active participation from the reader through the ‘Have a go’ exercises wherever appropriate. The ‘Practice considerations’ that have been documented add tremendous value to anyone looking to implement various aspects of ITIL 4, as the author shares her real-world concerns and constraints.
For those new to ITIL 4, the Service Value System has been covered extensively, with particular emphasis on ‘The 7 guiding principles’ and the ‘34 ITIL practices’.
This book is a must-have item on your desk for its simplicity in presentation, thoroughness in detail and pragmatism in approach.
Sanjay Nair
PREFACE
I’ve been involved with ITIL® and IT service management for more than 15 years. In that time, I’ve worked in operational and consulting roles, before setting up my own training and consulting organisations. I know from my professional and personal experience how satisfying it is when technology works, and how frustrating it can be when it doesn’t.
When writing this book, I noticed that, while there are many ITSM publications available, there is still little practical guidance for the new ITSM practitioner. There is a wide range of ‘exam pass’ guides, but these don’t add much value once your exam is complete.
This book contains everything you need to know to pass the ITIL 4 Foundation Certificate, but much more as well.
I’ve covered practices and concepts that are not addressed as part of the Foundation syllabus, and provided practical tips for applying service management. I’ve added to the theory by including practice considerations, based on my experiences.
As you proceed through the book, you can easily see which content is related to the ITIL 4 Foundation syllabus, and which isn’t.
Content related to the Foundation syllabus is highlighted with this symbol:
Content that is not part of the Foundation syllabus is highlighted with this symbol:
Unless stated otherwise, all quotations are from ITIL® Foundation, ITIL 4 edition.
I wish you every success in your ITIL Foundation exam and hope you will continue to use this book as you work with IT service management in your day-to-day role.
Claire Agutter
Director
ITSM Zone/Scopism
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Claire Agutter is a service management trainer, consultant and author. In 2017 and 2018 she was recognised as an HDI Top 25 Thought Leader in Technical Support and Service Management and was part of the team that won itSMF UK’s 2017 Thought Leadership Award. Claire is the host of the popular ITSM Crowd hangouts and Chief Architect for VeriSM. She is the director of ITSM Zone, which provides online IT service management training, and Scopism, a content and consulting organisation.
After providing training to thousands of successful Foundation candidates, Claire has written this book to provide essential guidance for ITSM practitioners preparing for their ITIL® 4 Foundation exam. The book also provides practical guidance on the application of ITIL and ITSM concepts in their workplace.
For more information, please see:
•https://itsm.zone;
•www.scopism.com; and
•Contact: www.linkedin.com/in/claireagutter/.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Anna Leyland; managing consultant at Sopra Steria UK Limited and Sanjay Nair; helpdesk manager at his current workplace, for their time and helpful comments during the development of this book.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1: Key concepts of service management
Why is service management important?
Why use ITIL® for service management?
A brief history of ITIL
Why has ITIL been successful?
Value
Service management
Service management as a professional practice
Organisation
Co-creation
Chapter 2: Service management roles
Some role considerations
Service provider
Stakeholder
Service relationship
Service consumer
Using RACI models for role mapping
Chapter 3: All about services
Products and services
Outputs and outcomes
Cost and risk
Utility and warranty
Chapter 4: Service relationships
Service offerings
Service relationships
The service relationship model
Chapter 5: The four dimensions of service management
Dimension 1: Organizations & people
Dimension 2: Information & technology
Dimension 3: Partners & suppliers
Dimension 4: Value streams & processes
Chapter 6: The Service Value System
Chapter 7: The SVS: Opportunity, demand, value
Chapter 8: The SVS: Guiding principles
Guiding principle 1: Focus on value
Guiding principle 2: Start where you are
Guiding principle 3: Progress iteratively with feedback
Guiding principle 4: Collaborate and promote visibility
Guiding principle 5: Think and work holistically
Guiding principle 6: Keep it simple and practical
Guiding principle 7: Optimize and automate
The benefits of automation
Getting ready to automate
Service management automation
Chapter 9: The SVS: Governance
Chapter 10: The SVS: The service value chain
Activity: Plan
Activity: Improve
Activity: Engage
Activity: Design & transition
Activity: Obtain/build
Activity: Deliver & support
Chapter 11: ITIL practices introduced
From processes to practices
Process models
Chapter 12: General management practices
Continual improvement
Practice considerations
Putting continual improvement to work
Architecture management
Practice considerations
Information security management
Practice considerations
Knowledge management
Practice considerations
Measurement and reporting
Practice considerations
Organisational change management
Practice considerations
Portfolio management
Practice considerations
Project management
Practice considerations
Relationship management
Practice considerations
Risk management
Practice considerations
Service financial management
Practice considerations
Strategy management
Practice considerations
Supplier management
Service integration and management
Practice considerations
Workforce and talent management
Practice considerations
Chapter 13: Service management practices
Availability management
Practice considerations
Business analysis
Process considerations
Capacity and performance management
Practice considerations
Change enablement
Practice considerations
Incident management
Practice considerations
IT asset management
Practice considerations
Monitoring and event management
Practice considerations
Problem management
Practice considerations
Release management
Practice considerations
Service catalogue management
Practice considerations
Service configuration management
Practice considerations
Service continuity management
Practice considerations
Service design
Design thinking
Practice considerations
The service desk
Practice considerations
Service level management
Practice considerations
Service request management
Practice considerations
Service validation and testing
Practice considerations
Chapter 14: Technical management practices
Deployment management
Practice considerations
Infrastructure and platform management
Practice considerations
Software development and management
Practice considerations
Chapter 15: Service management training and qualifications
The ITIL qualification scheme
Chapter 16: Multiple-choice exam strategies
The ITIL Foundation certificate
Sample exams
Approaching multiple-choice exams
Bibliography
Further reading
CHAPTER 1: KEY CONCEPTS OF SERVICE MANAGEMENT
We’re going to start by taking a look at what service management actually means. Service management describes a way of working within an organisation that helps to deliver value to the organisation’s customers, so it is worth spending time analysing its definition, along with some of the related concepts.
Why is service management important?
In today’s world, information technology (IT) is a fully integrated part of everyone’s life. Whether using a smartphone, withdrawing cash from an ATM, paying bills, or booking tickets on the Internet, IT is present in everything we do. It often plays a supporting role, so we don’t even think about what we are using until it stops working.
In the modern business organisation, we see the same reliance on IT and IT-enabled services. Every department, from finance and customer services through to logistics, relies on IT to carry out its role effectively and efficiently. Effectiveness refers to whether IT is able to achieve its objectives. Efficiency refers to whether IT uses an appropriate amount of resources. An efficient IT organisation will use optimal amounts of time, money, staff, etc.
Now, more than ever, organisations need effective and efficient IT to survive. IT supports critical business processes that generate revenue, serve customers and allow business goals to be achieved. At the same time, the IT department or IT organisation is under more and more pressure to deliver better services, often at a reduced cost. It needs to find a balance between supply and demand, service cost and service quality.
To make sure that IT can support business objectives properly, organisations need service management. Service management makes sure that the IT-enabled services delivered do what the business needs, when the business needs it.
With effective support and good-quality IT-enabled services, organisations can adopt bold strategies, including the expansion of existing services and movement into new markets. With poor-quality services, organisations will struggle to deliver what they do now, let alone expand and offer anything new or exciting. Now, when many organisations are adopting a strategy focused on ‘digital transformation’, this topic becomes even more relevant.
Why use ITIL® for service management?
It is worthwhile asking ‘what is ITIL and why is it important?’ ITIL is considered best practice for IT service management (ITSM). It was originally developed by the UK government, and is now adopted by many organisations in both the public and private sectors globally.
ITIL is not a prescriptive standard that must be followed. It does not say what must be done in a service provider organisation, and there is no certificate or award for successfully adopting ITIL in an organisation. Instead, ITIL is a framework that organisations can adopt and adapt to improve the way they deliver their IT-enabled services.
ITIL is a widely recognised source of best practice. It supports organisations as they deliver services that meet their customers’ needs, at a price the customer is willing to pay.
In today’s economic climate, organisations cannot afford to stand still. They need to review their performance and compare it to their competitors and make sure they are improving constantly. Using best practice available in the public domain can support internal improvement.
This thinking doesn’t just apply to the private sector. Public-sector organisations, such as local and central government departments, also need to demonstrate that they offer quality services and value for money. They might not be measured on profit, but there will be service objectives that they have to meet.
A brief history of ITIL
ITIL was developed by the UK government in the 1980s to help improve the quality of IT-enabled services and IT projects. The Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA, later renamed the Office of Government Commerce) was tasked with developing a framework for efficient and financially responsible use of IT resources in a government environment.
The earliest version of ITIL was called the Government Information Technology Infrastructure Management (GITIM). GITIM focused on service support and service delivery, but was very different from the current version of ITIL. Large companies and government agencies started to adopt ITIL, spreading service management practices across the globe.
In 2000, Microsoft® used ITIL to develop the Microsoft Operations Framework. In 2001, version 2 of ITIL was released, with training based on the Service Support and Service Delivery core publications. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world took ITIL training and achieved certification to help them manage IT-enabled services and environments, and progress in their ITSM careers.
In 2007, version 3 of ITIL was released, with an update to v3 in 2011. ITIL v3 was based around a service lifecycle that included:
•Service strategy
•Service design
•Service transition
•Service operation
•Continual service improvement
The newest ITIL version is ITIL 4. Released in 2019, ITIL 4 has evolved to a value system-focused approach that can be integrated with other management practices and ways of working, such as Agile and DevOps.
Why has ITIL been successful?
ITIL is not academic and theoretical. It is based on the experience of ITSM practitioners and offers a practical approach that has evolved over many years. The introduction of a value system-focus in ITIL 4 means that organisations must concentrate less on technology and more on how to co-create value with either internal or external customers. Common processes and practices and a strong service management framework all help to support the focus on value.
ITIL is successful because it is:
•Vendor neutral: ITIL is not linked to one supplier, or one technology, or one industry. This means it can be adopted across all types and sizes of organisation.
•Non-prescriptive: Organisations need to adopt and adapt the elements of ITIL that work for them and their customers.
•Best practice: ITIL draws on experience from service management practitioners across the globe.
Best practice simply means:
Proven activities or processes that have been successfully used in multiple organizations.1
ITIL is seen as being preferable to the proprietary knowledge that builds up inside organisations and the minds of staff members. Proprietary knowledge isn’t usually documented in a consistent way. It exists because it has built up over time. This means it is not challenged or improved – and can create a real risk if an experienced staff member leaves and takes their proprietary knowledge with them.
In this chapter, we’re going to take a look at some of the key concepts related to service management.
Remember to look out for the symbols that denote content related to the ITIL 4 Foundation syllabus. We’ll be examining syllabus-related content in this chapter.
Denotes syllabus-related content.
Value
Products and services need to add value to consumers to be successful. Value is “the perceived benefits, usefulness and importance of something”.
Some products and services are directly purchased by consumers, such as bank accounts and mobile phones. If a consumer doesn’t feel they are receiving value, the service provider organisation will know very quickly because the consumer will choose a different product or service, probably from a rival organisation.
Where the service relationship is defined less clearly, the service provider organisation might have to work harder to find out if their consumers feel that they are receiving value. For example, the television package that you pay for might include a news channel that you don’t watch because you feel it’s biased, so you consume news via the Internet instead. Because you still purchase the package, it’s more difficult for your service provider to measure this and identify an improvement opportunity.
Value encompasses more than just ‘value for money’. Some products and services are more expensive than others, but consumers choose them because they save time or convey status. Service provider organisations need to understand what it is that consumers value about their products and services. Services also need to create value for the service provider, to allow them to continue to provide the service in the future.
Service management
Services deliver value to consumers. If a service isn’t carefully managed, the value might be less or might not be delivered at all. An IT-enabled service needs to be measured, monitored and maintained to continue working effectively. An IT organisation can’t just put a service into the live environment and forget about it.
ITIL provides good practices for managing IT-enabled services. It doesn’t matter what job you have in IT; your role is part of the overall service that is being offered to the consumer.
Most modern organisations rely on IT to be effective. They expect IT to be available and responsive, and communicate with them regularly. Technology alone does not deliver a good service. Technology needs to be managed to meet the customer’s needs. The need for a more holistic approach to IT-enabled services is reflected in the four dimensions of service management described in the ITIL 4 guidance.
The definition of service management is:
“A set of specialized organizational capabilities for enabling value for customers in the form of services”.
Capabilities refer to the ability of an organisation to carry out a task or activity. The more mature the organisation, the better its capabilities should be. Capabilities will be based on an organisation’s experience of customers, processes, services, tools, market conditions, etc. This experience grows over time. Where an organisation has low or immature capabilities, it may choose to source capabilities from an external organisation.
An organisation can only develop these specialised organisational capabilities when it understands:
•The nature of value;
•The nature and scope of the stakeholders involved; and
•How value creation is enabled through services.
Service management as a professional practice
Service management should be viewed as a professional practice. It is supported by an extensive body of knowledge, experience and skills that has built up as the IT industry matured and developed a service focus.
There is a global community of professionals that supports service management, including organisations like the IT Service Management Forum. You can read more about the itSMF at www.itsmfi.org, including learning about your national chapter and any resources that are available to support you. The itSMF allows service management practitioners to connect with each other and share feedback, ideas and experiences.
The ITIL service management framework is supported by a scheme that provides quality assured education, training and certification. There are also other related training and certification schemes, covering areas such as project management, change management, business analysis, and service integration and management.
In addition, there is a wealth of service management information available – including academic research and formal standards related to services and service management, such as ISO/IEC 20000, as well as blogs, forums and other more informal content.
Service management has developed as IT’s focus has moved from a technology-centric approach to an end-to-end service and value-based approach. The ITIL 4 approach focuses on the consumer and the quality of service the consumer receives. IT is increasingly seen as a vital business enabler, and IT plans must be aligned to overall business models, strategies and plans.
Another factor that has contributed to the advancement and development of service management is the increasing complexity of service delivery. More and more organisations are using shared services or have outsourced some or all IT provision to external organisations. As the number of stakeholders involved with service delivery increases, more sophisticated service management is required to control them. As supply chains get more complex, service management practices need to adapt. The increased complexity of delivery has strengthened and improved service management, as well as imposing greater challenges.
Organisation
Organisations facilitate value creation. The definition of an organisation is:
“A person or a group of people that has its own functions with responsibilities, authorities, and relationships to achieve its objectives”.
An organisation could be:
•A single person;
•A team within an organisation;
•A legal entity (a company, or a charity); or
•A government department or public-sector body.
Note that an organisation can be a single person – for example, a sole trader. Within this definition, an organisation does not have to be a legal entity. It could be a team that interacts with other teams inside the same legal entity (for example, the IT department provides services to the marketing department).
It’s important to define what the term ‘organisation’ refers to so that relationships can be identified and managed. For example, some businesses expect their IT department to behave like an external service provider organisation and to transact with the other business departments as customer organisations. Other businesses define themselves as a single organisation and see all of their internal departments working together as part of the whole organisation. There is no right or wrong way to structure these relationships, but they do need to be defined and managed.
Historically, some organisations did not listen to their customers. They saw their relationship with customers as being:
•One-directional
•Distant
•Without feedback
