ITIL Foundation V5 cheat sheet

Seven guiding principles: focus on value; start where you are; progress iteratively with feedback; collaborate and promote visibility; think and work holistically; keep it simple and practical; optimize and automate.

A guiding principle is a recommendation that guides an organization in all circumstances, regardless of changes in goals, strategies, type of work, or management structure; principles are universal and enduring.

Focus on value: everything the organization does must map, directly or indirectly, to value for itself, its customers, and other stakeholders; value is defined by the recipient, not the provider.

Start where you are: assess what already exists before building anew; do not discard existing services, processes, people, or tools without evaluating their usefulness.

Progress iteratively with feedback: organize work into small, manageable iterations, and seek and use feedback before, during, and after each iteration rather than waiting for a final review.

Collaborate and promote visibility: work across boundaries with the right stakeholders, and make information openly available; decisions improve when based on accurate, shared information.

Think and work holistically: no service, practice, process, team, or supplier stands alone; outcomes are delivered through the integrated management of the whole system.

Keep it simple and practical: eliminate steps, activities, or metrics that add no value; if a conflict exists between simplicity and completeness, favor simplicity that still delivers the outcome.

Optimize and automate: optimize human-performed work and technology-supported work before automating; automation should not be applied to inefficient or unnecessary activity.

Service: a means of enabling value co-creation by facilitating outcomes that customers want to achieve, without the customer having to manage specific costs and risks.

Product: a configuration of an organization's resources designed to offer value for a consumer; services are offered through products, and each product may contain one or more services.

Utility is the functionality offered by a product or service to meet a particular need (what it does, fit for purpose); warranty is assurance that it will meet agreed requirements (fit for use).

Warranty dimensions: availability, capacity, security, and continuity; a service needs both utility and warranty to deliver value.

Outcome: a result for a stakeholder enabled by one or more outputs; output is a tangible or intangible deliverable of an activity.

Cost is the amount of money spent on a specific activity or resource; risk is the possible negative consequence of an action or decision, expressed as uncertainty of outcome.

Customer: the role that defines the requirements for a service and takes responsibility for the outcomes of service consumption; user: the role that uses services.

Service relationship types: service provision (organization provides services), service consumption (organization consumes services), and service relationship management (joint activities to co-create value).

Value co-creation: value is created jointly through the interaction of provider and consumer; the provider does not deliver value unilaterally, and value is realized only in the consumer's context.

The four dimensions are organizations and people; information and technology; partners and suppliers; value streams and processes; all four are critical and must be addressed together for a holistic approach.

Organizations and people: covers roles and responsibilities, formal organizational structures, culture, required staffing and competencies, and how people are led and supported.

Information and technology: covers the information and knowledge needed to manage services, and the technologies (systems, tools, platforms) that support them, including security and information governance.

Partners and suppliers: covers the organization's relationships with other organizations involved in designing, developing, deploying, delivering, supporting, and continually improving services, including contracts and dependencies.

Value streams and processes: defines how the parts of the organization work together in an integrated way; processes transform inputs into outputs, and value streams are the series of steps an organization uses to create and deliver products and services.

The dimensions are affected by external factors: political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental (PESTLE), plus factors such as emerging technologies and changing customer expectations.

No dimension operates in isolation; a change in one dimension (for example a new technology) usually requires corresponding changes in the others (people, partners, processes).

Process characteristics: a process is a set of interrelated or interacting activities that transform inputs into outputs; processes are measurable, have specific results, and have a defined owner.

The service value system (SVS) describes how all components and activities of an organization work together to facilitate value creation; it takes demand and opportunity as inputs and yields value as output.

SVS components: guiding principles, governance, service value chain, practices, and continual improvement.

Opportunity represents options or possibilities to add value for stakeholders or otherwise improve the organization; demand represents the need or desire for products and services among internal and external consumers.

The service value chain is an operating model with six activities: plan; improve; engage; design and transition; obtain/build; deliver and support.

Plan: ensures a shared understanding of the vision, current status, and improvement direction for all four dimensions and all products and services across the organization.

Improve: ensures continual improvement of products, services, and practices across all value chain activities and the four dimensions.

Engage: provides a good understanding of stakeholder needs, transparency, and continual engagement and good relationships with all stakeholders.

Design and transition: ensures that products and services continually meet stakeholder expectations for quality, costs, and time to market. Obtain/build: ensures service components are available when and where needed and meet agreed specifications. Deliver and support: ensures services are delivered and supported according to agreed specifications and stakeholder expectations.

Governance: the means by which an organization is directed and controlled; it is realized through the governing body's direction and control, and evaluates, directs, and monitors the organization.

The value chain is not a linear sequence; activities interact in various combinations and sequences to form value streams, and each value stream is a specific combination tailored to a scenario.

A practice is a set of organizational resources designed for performing work or accomplishing an objective; practices include resources based on the four dimensions (people, information and technology, partners and suppliers, value streams and processes).

Management practices: 14 practices with a holistic, organization-wide purpose (for example architecture management, continual improvement, information security management, supplier management, relationship management, portfolio management, risk management).

Service management practices: 17 practices focused on services (for example service desk, incident management, problem management, change enablement, service request management, service level management, service configuration management, release management, deployment management, availability management, capacity and performance management, IT asset management).

Technical management practices: 3 practices (deployment management, infrastructure and platform management, software development and management); these are grouped by technology domain.

Incident management: the practice of minimizing the negative impact of incidents by restoring normal service operation as quickly as possible; an incident is an unplanned interruption to, or reduction in the quality of, a service.

Problem management: the practice of reducing the likelihood and impact of incidents by identifying actual and potential causes of incidents and managing workarounds and known errors; a problem is a cause, or potential cause, of one or more incidents.

Change enablement: the practice of ensuring that risks are properly assessed, authorizing changes to proceed, and managing a change schedule in order to maximize the number of successful service and product changes.

Service desk: the practice that captures demand for incident resolution and service requests; it is the entry point and single point of contact for the service provider with its users.

Service level management: the practice of setting clear business-based targets for service levels and ensuring delivery against them; it uses SLAs, which are agreements between a provider and a customer.

Service request management: the practice of supporting the agreed quality of a service by handling all pre-defined, user-initiated service requests in an effective and user-friendly manner.

Continual improvement: the practice of aligning an organization's practices and services with changing business needs through the ongoing identification and improvement of services, service components, practices, or any element involved in the efficient and effective management of products and services.

The continual improvement model has six steps: (1) What is the vision? (2) Where are we now? (3) Where do we want to be? (4) How do we get there? (5) Take action. (6) Did we get there? Each step is revisited iteratively, and 'keep momentum going' is an underlying theme.

Step 1 (vision) sets the direction; step 2 uses assessments such as baseline audits and gap analysis; step 3 sets measurable targets and objectives; step 4 defines the improvement plan; step 5 executes; step 6 measures results and confirms the improvement.

Continual improvement should be embedded in every value chain activity and every practice, not treated as a standalone project; it uses metrics and KPIs to demonstrate progress.

Improvement types can be described by their scope and impact: incremental, iterative, and large-scale (for example a major transformation); improvement is driven by both top-down direction and bottom-up feedback.

Organizational change management: the practice of ensuring that changes in an organization are smoothly and successfully implemented and that lasting benefits are achieved by managing the human aspects of change.

Resistance to change is a normal human response; effective change management identifies stakeholders, communicates purpose and benefit, involves people, and provides support and training rather than relying on mandate alone.

Change readiness: assess the impact of change on people and roles, plan communication and engagement, and confirm the change is sustained after implementation through reinforcement and measurement.

Continual improvement and organizational change are complementary: improvement defines the desired future state, while organizational change management addresses the people-related transition to that state.