ITIL Practices: Structure and the Ones That Get Tested
34 practices in three families
A practice is a set of organizational resources designed for performing work or accomplishing an objective - resources meaning people, technology, information and partners. ITIL 4 defines 34 practices in three groups: 14 management practices (e.g. continual improvement, information security management, knowledge management, measurement and reporting, portfolio management, risk management, supplier management), 17 service management practices (e.g. service desk, incident management, problem management, change enablement, service level management, service request management, service configuration management, release management, availability management, service continuity management), and 3 technical practices (deployment management, infrastructure and platform management, software development and management).
Know the purpose statements of the most-quoted practices: incident management restores normal service operation as quickly as possible; problem management reduces the likelihood and impact of incidents by identifying actual and potential causes and managing workarounds; change enablement maximizes the number of successful service and product changes by ensuring risks are properly assessed and authorizing changes to proceed; the service desk captures demand and is the single point of contact between provider and users; service level management sets clear business-based targets for service levels and ensures delivery against them.
Worked example: a recurring outage. Restoring service is incident management. Investigating the underlying cause is problem management. Deploying the fix is change enablement plus release and deployment management. Four practices, one event - questions exploit exactly this overlap.
Traps: treating incident and problem as the same practice; believing change enablement approves every change (it is risk-based, and standard changes are pre-authorized); assuming deployment and release are identical; thinking a workaround is a permanent fix; treating the service desk as the only place demand is captured.
Rule of thumb: learn purpose statements, not activities. Answer choices are usually wrong on purpose, not on detail.