In ITIL, a management practice is a set of organizational resources designed for performing work or accomplishing an objective.
General Management Practices
Architecture Management Practice
The purpose of the architecture management practice is to provide an understanding of all the different elements that make up an organization and how those elements interrelate, enabling the organization to effectively achieve its current and future objectives.
It provides the principles, standards, and tools that enable an organization to manage complex change in a structured and Agile way. The architecture management practice develops and maintains reference architectures that depict current and target states across various domains: business, information, data, application, technology, and environment. These architectures provide a framework for all planning activities within the service value chain, guiding the strategic direction and ensuring alignment with business objectives. Reviews of business, service, information, technical, and environmental architectures are conducted to identify opportunities for improvement. This continual assessment ensures that services evolve to meet changing needs and contribute to the overall enhancement of service management practices. The practice facilitates understanding the organization's readiness to access new or under-served markets and respond to a broader range of products and services. It assesses and aligns the organization's capabilities with detailed activities required to co-create value, ensuring the organization can adapt to changing circumstances rapidly. When a product or service is ready for development or change, the architecture, design, and build teams evaluate whether it meets investment objectives and strategic alignment. The service architecture, which includes the structure and dynamics of the service (activities, resources, interactions), is crucial during design and transition to ensure effective delivery and support. A service model can be employed as a blueprint or template for these activities. The reference architectures are used continually as part of the operation, restoration, and maintenance of products and services Architecture Types
It examines the organization's capabilities and how they align with activities needed to deliver value to customers. A 'roadmap' is created to outline the incremental steps required to transition from the current state to a future state that achieves the organization's strategic goals. Provides an overview of all services offered by the organization, detailing interactions and service models that describe how service components interconnect. Service models serve as blueprints or templates for the design and implementation of multiple services. Information Systems Architecture (including Data and Applications Architectures) Describes how the organization's logical and physical data assets are managed and the data management resources. Emphasizes the necessity for information to be complete, accurate, and accessible, ensuring information systems are designed with these principles. Defines the necessary software and hardware infrastructure to support the organization's portfolio of products and services. Ensures that the technology infrastructure aligns with and supports the overall business and service strategy. Environmental Architecture:
It encompasses the analysis and design of business strategies in response to external factors and drivers of change, which affect the organization. This includes considering diverse elements such as technological trends, business climates, operational constraints, organizational structures, political landscapes, economic conditions, regulatory frameworks, ecological factors, and social influences.
Continual Improvement
Portfolio Management
The purpose of the portfolio management practice is to ensure that the organization has the right mix of programs, projects, products, and services to execute the organization’s strategy within its funding and resource constraints.
Portfolio management plays an important role in how resources are allocated, deployed, and managed across the organization
Relationship Management
The purpose of the relationship management practice is to establish and nurture the links between the organization and its stakeholders at strategic and tactical levels.
It includes the identification, analysis, monitoring, and continual improvement of relationships with and between stakeholders.
Risk Management
The purpose of the risk management practice is to ensure that the organization understands and effectively handles risks.
Managing risk is essential to ensuring the ongoing sustainability of an organization and creating value for its customers. Risk management is an integral part of all organizational activities and therefore central to the organization’s SVS
Service Financial Management
The purpose of the service financial management practice is to support the organization’s strategies and plans for service management by ensuring that the organization’s financial resources and investments are being used effectively.
Service financial management supports decision-making by the governing body and management of the organization regarding where to best allocate financial resources.
Strategy Management
The purpose of the strategy management practice is to formulate the goals of the organization and adopt the courses of action and allocation of resources necessary for achieving those goals.
Strategy management establishes the organization’s direction, focuses effort, defines or clarifies the organization’s priorities, and provides consistency or guidance in response to the environment. The strategy of the organization establishes criteria and mechanisms that help to decide how to best prioritize resources, capabilities, and investment to achieve those outcomes, while the practice ensures that the strategy is defined, agreed, maintained, and achieved.
Supplier Management
The purpose of the supplier management practice is to ensure that the organization’s suppliers and their performances are managed appropriately to support the seamless provision of quality products and services.
This includes creating closer, more collaborative relationships with key suppliers to uncover and realize new value and reduce the risk of failure.
Workforce and Talent Management
The purpose of the workforce and talent management practice is to ensure that the organization has the right people with the appropriate skills and knowledge and in the correct roles to support its business objectives.
The practice covers a broad set of activities focused on successfully engaging with the organization’s employees and people resources, including planning, recruitment, onboarding, learning and development, performance measurement, and succession planning
Service Management Practices
Availability Management: Ensures services are available as agreed upon. Business Analysis: Identifies business needs and determines solutions to business problems. Capacity and Performance Management: Ensures services achieve agreed-upon and sustainable levels of performance. Change Control: Ensures changes are assessed, authorized, prioritized, planned, and implemented. Incident Management: Restores normal service operation as quickly as possible after an incident. IT Asset Management: Manages the lifecycle of IT assets. Monitoring and Event Management: Ensures services and components are constantly observed and events are managed. Problem Management: Manages the lifecycle of problems to prevent incidents from happening and to minimize the impact of incidents that cannot be prevented. Release Management: Plans, schedules, and controls the movement of releases. Service Catalog Management: Provides a single source of consistent information on all services. Service Configuration Management: Ensures that accurate and reliable information about the configuration of services is available. Service Continuity Management: Ensures that service availability and performance are maintained at a sufficient level in the case of a disaster. Service Design: Designs services based on a set of agreed-upon service requirements. Service Desk: Captures demand for incident resolution and service requests. Service Level Management: Sets clear business-based targets for service levels. Service Request Management: Fulfills pre-defined, standard service requests. Service Validation and Testing: Ensures that new or changed services match design specifications and will meet user needs. Availability management
The purpose of the availability management practice is to ensure that services deliver agreed levels of availability to meet the needs of customers and users.
Includes the following:
negotiating and agreeing achievable targets for availability designing infrastructure and applications that can deliver required availability levels ensuring that services and components are able to collect the data required to measure availability monitoring, analyzing, and reporting on availability planning improvements to availability MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures)
MTBF gives an idea of how often failures can be expected MTRS (Mean Time to Restore Service)
MTTR focuses on how quickly a system can be expected to recover from such failures.
Technical Management Practices
Deployment Management: Moves new or changed hardware, software, documentation, processes, or any other component to live environments. It may also be involved in deploying components to other environments for testing or staging Infrastructure and Platform Management: Oversees the infrastructure and platforms used by an organization. When carried out properly, this practice enables the monitoring of technology solutions available to the organization, including the technology of external service providers. Software Development and Management: Ensures that applications meet internal and external stakeholder needs.
Section 5: ITIL Management Practices
