All About ITIL 4 Practices – Updates, Practices and Benefits

S.No. 

Practice 

Objective 

 1

Architecture management 

Helps understand how different elements come together to make an organisation and how they are affiliated to each other, helping the organisation achieve all its objectives. It also provides the standards, tools, and principles needed by an organisation to deal with changes in an agile and structured way. 

 2

Continual improvement 

Helps identify and improve services, practices, service components, or any other elements used to efficiently and effectively manage products and services. It makes sure the organisation’s services and practices are aligned with changing needs of the business. 

 3

Information security management 

Helps protect the information required by the organisation to do business. It would include managing and understanding risk towards integrity, availability, and confidentiality of data and all other aspects of information security. 

 4

Knowledge management 

Helps improve and maintain the efficient, convenient, and effective use of knowledge and information in the organisation. 

 5

Measuring & reporting 

Helps in making good decisions by lowering the uncertainty levels. This is done by collecting important data on several objects and assessing this data in the right context. 

 6

Organisational change management 

Helps ensure the smooth implementation of change in an organisation. It also helps manage the human aspects to make sure the benefits last. 

 7

Portfolio management 

Helps make sure the organisation contains the right blend of products, services, projects, and programs so it is able to implement strategies while staying within the resource and budget constraints. 

 8

Project management 

Helps make sure the projects are delivered successfully. It makes sure all aspects of a project are planned, delegated, monitored, and controlled.  

 9

Relationship management 

Helps nurture and establish the relationship between the company and stakeholders at all levels. This is done by identifying, analysing, monitoring, and continuously improving relationships with the stakeholders. 

 10

Risk management 

Helps the organisation understand and effectively handle risks. It is crucial to keep the organisation sustainable and valuable for the customers. 

 11

Service financial management 

Helps the organisation implement plans and strategies for service management. This is achieved by making sure that all of the organisation’s financial investments and resources are used effectively. 

 12

Strategy management 

Helps map out the organisation goals and take the appropriate course of action (including the allocation of resources) required to achieve the goals. This practice helps formulate a direction for the organisation, defines priorities, centres effort, and provides guidance according to the environment. 

 13

Supplier management 

Helps manage the suppliers of the organisation appropriately so there is a consistent flow of quality services and products. It also develops highly collaborative relationships with important suppliers to discern new found value while reducing risks of failure. 

 14

Workforce & talent management 

Helps support the organisation’s business objectives by making sure the right people are hired. This is done by properly recruiting, planning, onboarding, learning, measuring, and succession planning.  

S.No. 

 Practice 

 Objective 

 1

Availability management 

Helps make sure that all the services offered by the organisation are able to deliver the level of availability required by the users and customers. 

 2

Business analysis 

Helps analyse a business to define the needs associated with it and the solutions needed to address the needs. It also includes solving business problems and creating value for stakeholders.  

 3

Capacity & performance management 

Helps achieve the expected performance for services that effectively satisfies the demands. 

 4

Change enablement 

Helps maximise successful IT changes. This is achieved by assessing risks, managing change schedule, and authorising the changes. 

 5

Incident management 

Helps lower the negative impact incidents can have by reinstating service operations as soon as possible. 

 6

IT asset management 

Helps manage and plan the lifecycle of IT assets. This helps maximise value, manage risks, control costs, support decision-making, meet contractual needs, and reuse and retire assets. 

 7

Monitoring & event management 

Helps observe service components and services in a systematic way, and report and record events. This is achieved by prioritising and identifying services, infrastructure, information security events, and business processes. The practice also helps in starting appropriate responses for the events. 

 8

Problem management 

Helps lower the impact and chances of incidents. This is achieved by identifying causes of incidents and managing solutions. 

 9

Release management 

Helps release changed and new features and services. 

 10

Service catalogue management 

Helps create a specific source of constant information on all service offerings and makes sure that the information is available to the appropriate audience. 

 11

Service configuration management 

Helps make reliable and accurate information available. This could be about the configuration services, the items that support them, how the items are configured, and the relationship between the items.  

 12

Service continuity management 

Helps maintain the performance and availability of a service at sufficient levels in case of a disaster. It also provides a structure to build resilience in the organisation, along with building the capability to produce efficient responses that can secure the interests of stakeholders. This would also include upholding the organisation’s brand value, reputation, and activities. 

 13

Service design 

Helps design services and products that can be easily delivered by the company and its ecosystem, and to make sure they are fit to use and fit for purpose.  

 14

Service desk 

Helps apprehend the demand for service requests and incident resolutions. It also serves as the single point of contact with users for service providers.  

 15

Service level management 

Helps appropriately assess, monitor, and manage delivery of services against set targets. This is done by clearly defining business targets for performance.  

 16

Service request management 

Helps effectively manage user-initiated requests so that the required service quality can be maintained.  

 17

Service validation & testing 

Helps products and service meet requirements. This is done by defining the service values according to customer feedback, business goals, and requirements stated in the regulations. The feedback establishes performance indicators and measurable quality. 

 S.No. 

 Practice 

 Objective 

 1

Deployment management 

Helps move components like software, hardware, processes, documentation, etc. To live environments. It also helps deploy components in other environments for staging or testing. 

 2

Infrastructure & platform management 

Helps supervise the platforms and infrastructure used by the organisation. This helps monitor technology solutions. 

 3

Software development & management 

Helps make sure the applications are meeting the needs of both the external and internal stakeholders. This would include all aspects like reliability, functionality, auditability, maintainability, and compliance.