The Key Concepts Of ITIL That One Should Know

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a renowned framework that has a set of best practices for developing and executing the IT service management. Organisations have already realized that the adoption of the ITIL framework is the foundation of success as well as to attain a competitive edge over their competitors in a highly volatile business environment. More than 10,000 organizations are constantly improving IT services and business services by adopting this renowned ITIL approach.

So, Organisations expect ITIL certification as part of their job requirements and partner with us to conduct sessions on ITIL and motivate their employees to attain ITIL certification. Being ITIL certified is the best way to let your recruiter know that you are keen on a role in the IT Service Industry and turn into a preferred candidate.

Whether you have already started working in an ITIL environment or you are about to step into this world, it is extremely useful if you gain some familiarity with the basic concepts of ITIL. This article is a beginner’s guide for ITIL  Key concepts and help you to gain a better knowledge of ITIL works. Let’s dive in now.

IT SERVICE LIFECYCLE

The IT service lifecycles are

Service Strategy

Service Design

Service Transition

Service Operation

Continual Service Improvement

These five broad categories are what gets defined in entire ITIL framework wherein all of the ITIL Service Lifecycle phases are interconnected and run continuously.

ITIL – Service Strategy:

Talking about ITIL’s first phase of IT service management, Service Strategy is the origin point of the ITIL service lifecycle. We can see a service provider developing the service concepts that assist the organization in achieving their goals and objectives.

Service Portfolio Management (SPM): Being responsible for an initial service design, Service Portfolio Management takes care of customers interests across the service lifecycle. It defines fours essential steps namely, define, analyze, approve, and charter for organizing its process.

Business Relationship Management: The main process objective of Business Relationship Management is to maintain a positive relationship with customers. The demands of current and future customers are analyzed here, in addition, it also ensures that the correct services are created and defined to meet the customer’s needs.

Financial management: As goes with the name, this part of the IT service is responsible for managing the budget and make sure funds are available for the development of new services. We can divide financial management into three subdivisions namely budgeting, accounting, and charging.

Demand management: The process objective of Demand management is set to understand and realize the needs of the customer demands and also work with Capacity management to ensure sufficient capacity is available.

Looking to do ITIL Service Strategy certification visit https://skillogic.com/itil-training/itil-intermediate/service-strategy-certification/

Service Design:

The second most important phase of IT service management talks about creating methods using the ideas defined in the first phase. Here, the design of services worked out and all supporting elements for introducing it into the live environment is discussed. Furthermore, when designing the services the four important P’s, People, Processes, Products, and Partners need to be considered.

Shall we now dwell on the Service design terms and concepts?

Design coordination: It is responsible for organizing all service design activities, operations, procedures, and assets.

Service Catalog Management: Service Catalog Management is the one in charge of producing and renewing of the service catalog. It consists of all information on the current services available for customers and the ones that will be delivered in the future.

Service Level Management: The process in charge for Service Level Agreements with customers which monitors the levels of performance and levels of reliability associated with the specific services. It is not associated with single SLA instead holds multiple types of agreements on different levels.

Availability Management: Evaluating the IT services and check whether they meet current as well as projected availability needs of the business in an economical and time-effective manner. We can see two interdependent levels here and they are Service Availability and Component Availability.

IT Service Continuity Management (ITCM): It ensures that a minimum and agreed upon levels of service is always served by the IT service provider by assessing the uncertainties.  Furthermore, it prepares the organization to recover from major emergencies to maintain the business continuity.

Information Security Management: A set of policies and procedures to safeguard the private and sensitive data by minimizing the risk and limiting the impact of the security breach.

Security Policy: It is the document that states the defined set of procedures that are agreed upon and adhered to at all levels. It also states how the company is planning to protect against security incidents.

Information Security Management System (ISMS) can be divided into 5 parts and each addressing different aspects of security threats. They the five parts are Plan, Implement, Control, Evaluate and Maintain.

Capacity Management: The primary goal of Capacity Management is to make sure that the information technology resources are correctly sized to meet the current and future business needs.

Business Capacity Management: Evaluates the future demand and make it available when the need arises.

Service Capacity Management: The daily operations of IT services are managed and controlled.

Component Capacity Management: Make sure that everything is running smoothly or if changes are required in IT infrastructure operations.

Looking to do ITIL Service Design certification visit: https://skillogic.com/itil-training/itil-intermediate/service-design-certification/

Service Transition:

Building and deploying IT services take place in this phase. Service Transition lifecycles are also taking care of changes that are implemented to services and service management processes are performed in a coordinated way.

Change Management: The lifecycle of all changes is controlled here and its main objective is to enable beneficial changes with minimum disruption of IT services.

Change Evaluation: Major changes are accessed before they are allowed to proceed to the next phase in their lifecycle.

Project Management (Transition Planning and Support): Resources planning and coordination happens here so that the major release happens within the predicted cost, time and quality estimates.

Application Development: The stage makes sure that the applications and systems delivering required functionality for IT services be readily available. In addition, Customisation of products and development, as well as maintenance of custom applications, happen here.

Release and Deployment Management: The movement of releases from test to live happens here and ensures that the integrity of the live environment is protected by following a proper roadmap of the plan, schedule, and control.

Service Validation and Testing: The verification of deployed Releases and the resulting services meet customer expectations happens here.  Also look to ensure that the IT operations are capable of supporting the new service.

Service Asset and Configuration Management: The information of Configuration Items required to deliver an IT service, including their relationships is maintained here.

Knowledge Management: Knowledge and information of an organization are important as they reduce the need to rediscover knowledge. Gathering, analyzing, storing and sharing of knowledge happens here.

Looking to do ITIL Service Transition certification visit https://skillogic.com/itil-training/itil-intermediate/service-transition-certification/

Service Operation:

The key objective of Service Operation is to ensure that the IT services are delivered effectively and efficiently.  The lifecycle of the Service operation is

Event Management: Ensure that the CIs and services are monitored constantly, and the events are filtered and categorized in order to decide on appropriate actions.

Incident Management: The lifecycle of all Incidents are effectively managed here. The primary objective is to get back the IT service to users as quickly as possible.

Request Fulfilment:  Service Requests are taken care at this stage, the most cases at this stage are minor (standard) Changes (e.g. requests to change a password) or requests for information.

Access Management: Granting access to authorized users to use a service while preventing access to non-authorized users is Access Management.  Also called as Rights Management or Identity Management, the policies defined in Information Security Management are executed here.

Problem Management: The lifecycle of all Problems is managed effectively at this stage. It also ensures that the Incidents needs to be prevented and to minimize the impact of incidents that cannot be prevented. Analyzing Incident Records, and using data collected by other IT Service Management processes to study trends or significant Problems is done by Problem Management.

IT Operations Control: IT services and their underlying infrastructure are monitored and controlled. It executes day-to-day routine tasks related to the operation of infrastructure components and applications which includes job scheduling, print, and output management, backup and restore activities and routine maintenance.

Facilities Management: Managing the facilities where the IT infrastructure is located that includes managing the entire physical environment. For example building access management, power and cooling and environmental monitoring.

Application Management: Applications are managed throughout their lifecycle by Application Management

Technical Management: It gives technical expertise and support for the management of the IT infrastructure.

Looking to do ITIL Service Operation certification visit https://skillogic.com/itil-training/itil-intermediate/service-operation-certification/

Continual Service Improvement:

The key objective of Continual Service Improvement is improving the effectiveness and efficiency of IT processes and services by adopting the concept of continual improvement. Also, Quality management methods are used in order to learn from past successes and failures.

The main processes of the Continual Service Improvement are

Service Review: Business services and infrastructure services are reviewed on a regular basis. The main objective of this process is to enhance the service quality where necessary, and identifying the ways to provide cost-effective service.

Process Evaluation: Processes are evaluated on a regular basis and identify areas where the targeted process metrics are not attained, and perform regular benchmarking, audits, maturity assessments and reviews.

CSI Initiatives: The process objective of CSI Initiatives is to define specific initiatives aimed at improving services and processes, based on the results of service reviews and process evaluations. The resulting initiatives may be internal initiatives pursued by the service provider on his own behalf or initiatives which require the customer’s cooperation.

Monitoring of CSI Initiatives: The process objective is to verify if improvement initiatives are moving according to plan, and to introduce corrective measures where necessary.

Looking to do ITIL Continual Service Improvement certification visit https://skillogic.com/itil-training/itil-intermediate/csi-certification/

We hope that the key concepts of ITIL discussed here are really helpful for you to gain the knowledge of different lifecycle of ITIL. Remember that there is still a long road to go.

ITIL is a globally accepted certificate that brings promising results for job seekers and it is a well-known fact that a professional with ITIL certification in his/her resume grabs more attention from a recruiter which the non-certified peer could miss.  So the popularity stems from the fact that having the certificate clearly opens doors to more jobs and the higher remuneration that comes with it.

If you are looking for “Certification Cost”, we have already published a detailed article that guides you to about the cost associated with different levels of ITIL certification. SKILLOGIC® offers best in class training programs for various ITIL levels and visit SKILLOGIC® Institute to enroll yourself in the world-class training for ITIL.