A guiding principle offers recommendations to navigate an organization, irrespective of shifts in objectives, strategies, tasks, or organizational structure. These principles are universal, timeless, and should remain constant. They underpin effective actions and informed decisions at every organizational tier, guiding service management adoption and tailoring ITIL guidance to specific requirements while fostering continuous improvement. These principles can be combined when making decisions, carefully considering their individual relevance, and organizations should be mindful of how they interact.
1) Focus on Value
Prioritizing value means ensuring every organizational action, directly or indirectly, contributes value to stakeholders. This principle considers customer and user experiences, loyalty, revenue, and growth. Value focus extends to both operational activities and improvement initiatives.
Considerations include:
- Identifying the service consumer.
- Understanding their value perspective: service needs, goal achievement, costs, and risks.
- Analyzing customer experience (CX): encompassing all interactions with the organization and its offerings, shaping customer sentiment.
Customer Experience (CX)
2) Start Where You Are
Avoid reinventing the wheel. Leverage existing resources—services, processes, programs, projects, and personnel—to achieve desired outcomes. Before improving a service, assess existing information. Directly investigate and observe the current state, supporting observations with measurement. Measurement is crucial but should complement, not replace, observation to avoid biases and risks in decision-making.
3) Progress Iteratively with Feedback
Avoid attempting everything at once. Even large initiatives should proceed iteratively. Divide work into smaller, manageable sections for timely execution and sharper focus. Using feedback before, during, and after each iteration ensures actions remain focused and appropriate, even with changing circumstances. Each iteration requires continual re-evaluation based on feedback, improving focus and maintainability.
Timeboxed, iterative working with feedback loops facilitates:
- Increased flexibility.
- Faster responsiveness to customer and business needs.
- Earlier discovery of and response to failures.
- Overall quality improvement.
4) Collaborate and Promote Visibility
Collaboration across boundaries and involving the right people in appropriate roles yields greater buy-in, relevance to objectives, and long-term success by improving information for decision-making. Achieving objectives demands information, understanding, and trust. Make work and its consequences visible, avoid hidden agendas, and maximize information sharing. Identify and manage all stakeholder groups for robust communication across staff. Increased collaboration and visibility reduces resistance to planned improvements. Insufficient visibility leads to poor decision-making, which can be avoided through critical analysis activities, such as:
- Understanding workflow.
- Identifying bottlenecks and excess capacity.
- Uncovering waste.
5) Think and Work Holistically
No service or element operates in isolation. The outcomes of both service providers and consumers suffer if the service is not treated as a whole. This principle is primarily concerned with end-to-end service delivery. It uses the four dimensions of service management to ensure coordination of all improvement initiatives. Results are delivered through effective, efficient management, and dynamic integration of information, technology, organization, people, practices, partners, and agreements—all coordinated to provide defined value.
6) Keep It Simple and Practical
Eliminate processes, services, actions, or metrics that do not provide value or produce useful outcomes. Use the fewest steps necessary to achieve objectives. Employ outcome-based thinking to create practical solutions that deliver results. Add controls and metrics only when needed. Services and processes should not cater to every exception.
7) Optimize and Automate
Maximize the use of all resources, especially human resources. Eliminate waste and leverage technology wherever possible. Human intervention should occur only where it adds value. Automation frees human resources for more complex tasks. Before automating an activity, optimize it as much as possible. Optimization begins with understanding the organization’s vision and objectives. This principle advocates using technology only when it provides clear benefits. It considers how process steps can be performed most efficiently.
- Optimization: Improving and increasing the efficiency of a process or service.
- Automation: Using technology to perform steps consistently and accurately with limited or no human involvement.
In conclusion, while all ITIL guiding principles contribute to effective service management, the “Think and Work Holistically” principle is the one primarily concerned with end-to-end service delivery. It emphasizes the interconnectedness of all elements involved in providing a service and the importance of coordinating them to deliver value.
