The Five Main Processes Of ITIL

Technology has, for several decades now been playing a critical role in the operations of businesses. It directly affects the ability of a company to communicate with both customers and internally. Technology has enhanced the efficiency and effectiveness of processes unique to different organizations. All businesses are, as a result looking to incorporate an IT infrastructure that will help them connect with consumers and run things as intended.

That said, there is a need for IT teams to align the IT infrastructure with the needs of the businesses. Through ITIL 4 Certification, you can understand the IT management services by learning about the model used to create, deliver and implement continual improvement of technology products and services. 

ITIL is detailed practices of IT management that look to align the IT services with the needs of an organization. Here are the main stages of ITIL.

1. Strategy design

This is the first stage of the ITIL lifecycle. Like many strategy formation steps, it is the foundation of the ITIL lifecycle for products and services. It is important to note that any IT provider who successfully delivers services follows through a service strategy consistently. Essential to note during the formulation of a strategy is that the business strategy and goals should be put into consideration. Taking the time to understand the objectives of the business will go a long way in coming up with a feasible long-term IT strategy. 

So, what should the strategy entail? It is a description of the guidelines that the provider will follow through in the management of IT services that he will stick to help the organization also to achieve its objective and mission.

2. Service design

Once a design that is in line with the objectives of the business has been created, the provider can proceed to the formulation of service design. The service design stage of the ITIL process looks to design new IT processes, services and other elements of service management.

This is the step where the strategies developed in the first step of strategy designs become actionable. The goals of this step are to improve the consistency and quality of services, to create and implement new IT services and make the necessary improvement to ensure that services align with the business requirements. It is in this stage that IT management is made more effective, and the effectiveness of the service system that is in place is measured.

3. Service transition

This step alone entails several processes. The objective of this stage of ITIL is to transfer the service design to a live environment. The objective of the service transition stage of ITIL is to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the deployment of new IT services. This way, the provider is able to implement new and modified IT services without affecting the operation of the existing one.

The service transition stage of ITIL looks to enable a provider to handle change. That is in customer requirements, and IT services. The significance of this stage is one, to make adaptability to new customer requirements easy. More so, the IT infrastructure and services change when businesses get into mergers and acquisitions. Service transitions are instrumental in increasing productivity, as services need to be changed from time to time to meet the changing business requirements. 

During service transition, it is essential to make predictions on the changes in service levels, when services change. This is top ensure a smooth flow of business processes when a new service goes live.

4. Service operation

This is the fourth stage in ITIL practices. At this point, a strategy and service have been designed. The new or modified service has then been deployed and gone live. From here, the next thing that takes place is the management of these services. The main objective is to provide the customer with an effective IT structure. Service operation itself has five processes. 

The first process, which is event management, looks to find the best control actions to coordinate events. Incident management is the second process which seeks to manage incidents such as restoring the disruption of services. Problem management, on the other hand, looks to find the root cause of an incident or the disruption of services. In the process, the occurrence of future incidents is prevented. 

The fourth process in-service operation in request fulfilment. During the entire ITIL lifecycle, requests will be coming from customers. Here the provider manages the requests. This is through actions such as recording and tracking of requests and completing fulfilment actions. 

Access management is the final process. In this case, the provider grants the customers access to use a particular service. The main objective of this is to point out authorized users and to manage their ability to use a service. Also, it entails the restriction of non-authorized users from accessing the services.

5. Continual service improvement

The final stage of ITIL practices is continual service improvement. Designing, deploying and managing services is not enough. Note that the business needs will constantly be changing. This only means that the services, have to, at some point, change to align with the new business objectives. It is, therefore, essential that the services are closely monitored and controlled. For effective and continual service improvement, the provider needs to have key performance indicators in place.

This will help him identify whether or not the services are running optimally. The provider should progressively monitor the services to determine whether they are meeting the expectations and targets as laid down by the business. The primary goal of this stage is to ensure that the services are in line with the business objectives. 

Through monitoring, the provider is able to identify the areas that need modifications to ensure that the service achieves the expected performance.

ITIL looks to ensure that IT services are effectively and efficiently deployed to the customers. ITIL practices have five main stages which include strategy design, service design, service transition, operation and continual service improvement. The objective of these stages is to ensure that the services align with the business objectives.