34 Practice Quick Reference Cards
How to use these cards
Each card provides a one-page summary of an ITIL v5 management practice:
- Purpose: Why this practice exists
- Key activities: What the practice must accomplish
- Key metrics: How to measure practice performance
- Key roles: Roles specific to this practice
- Key terms: Official definitions
Use these cards for quick reference during daily work, exam preparation, or when assessing the maturity of individual practices in your organization.
General Management Practices (12)
These practices can be applied to any product or service, as well as to general management activities of an organization.
Architecture Management
Purpose: Provide an understanding of all the different elements that make up an organization.
Key activities:
- Ensure the organization's strategy is supported with a target architecture
- Ensure the organization's architecture is continually evolving to the target state
Key metrics: Fulfilment of target architecture requirements, impact of architectural constraints on strategy, unassessed architecturally significant changes, projects/changes not aligned with target architecture, progress on architecture roadmap implementation
Key roles: Architect role, Architecture board
Key terms:
- Architecture principles: A set of norms and rules for the use and deployment of all resources and assets across an organization
- Interoperability: The ability of systems, applications, services, or any other architectural component to function together in a coordinated way
Business Analysis
Purpose: Analyse a part or the entirety of a business, define its needs, and recommend solutions to address these needs and/or solve a business problem.
Key activities:
- Establish and continually improve an organization-wide approach to business analysis
- Ensure that current and future needs of the organization and its customers are understood, analysed, and supported with timely, efficient, and effective solution proposals
Key metrics: Satisfaction with needs understanding and solution relevance, deviations from strategy, value realized from implemented solutions, timeliness of analysis and solution proposals
Key roles: Business analyst
Key terms:
- Utility: The functionality offered by a product or service to meet a particular need
- Warranty: Assurance that a product or service will meet agreed requirements
- Experience: The sum of the functional and emotional interactions with a service and provider as perceived by a stakeholder
Continual Improvement
Purpose: Align the organization's practices and services with changing business needs through the ongoing improvement of products, services, practices, or any element involved in the management of products and services.
Key activities:
- Establish and maintain an effective approach to continual improvement
- Ensure effective and efficient improvement across the organization
Key metrics: Satisfaction with value from improvement initiatives, awareness and adoption of continual improvement culture, successful improvement initiatives, initiatives delivered on time within cost
Key roles: Continual improvement manager
Key terms:
- Improvement: A deliberately introduced change that results in increased value for one or more stakeholders
- Improvement register: A database or structured document used to record and manage improvement initiatives throughout their lifecycles
Financial Management
Purpose: Support the organization's strategies and plans for service management by ensuring that the organization's financial resources and investments are being used effectively.
Key activities:
- Ensure that the organization's service financial management supports its overall strategy
- Ensure that reliable financial information is available as needed to support decision-making
Key metrics: Stakeholder satisfaction with financial management, blocked strategic decisions due to ineffective financial management, audit findings, overhead costs as percentage of total costs
Key roles: Service financial manager, Service financial authority
Key terms:
- Capital costs (Capex): Costs of purchasing or creating financial assets
- Operational costs (Opex): Costs an organization incurs through normal business operations
Knowledge Management
Purpose: Maintain and improve the effective, efficient, and convenient use of information and knowledge across the organization.
Key activities:
- Create and maintain valuable knowledge and transfer and use it across an organization
- Effectively use information to enable decision-making across an organization
Key metrics: Knowledge culture compliance, organization-wide knowledge practice adoption, information quality (accuracy, completeness), stakeholder satisfaction with informational support
Key roles: Knowledge manager
Key terms:
- Absorptive capacity: An organization's ability to recognize the value of new information, embed it, and apply it to business outcomes
- Knowledge asset: An information resource important for an organization's operations and value co-creation
Measurement and Reporting
Purpose: Support good decision-making and continual improvement by decreasing the levels of uncertainty.
Key activities:
- Ensure that measurements are driven by objectives
- Ensure the quality and availability of measurement data
- Ensure effective reporting to support decision-making
Key metrics: Objectives covered by measurement and reporting, data-to-errors ratio, consumer satisfaction with data quality, report timeliness
Key terms:
- Metric: A measurement or calculation that is monitored or reported for management and improvement
- KPI: An important metric used to evaluate the success in meeting an objective
Organizational Change Management
Purpose: Ensure that changes in an organization are implemented smoothly and successfully, and that lasting benefits are achieved by managing the human aspects of the changes.
Key activities:
- Create and maintain a change-enabling culture
- Establish and maintain a holistic approach to OCM
- Ensure organizational changes are realized in an effective manner
Key metrics: Awareness of change principles, organizational attitude toward change, level of change resistance, satisfaction with procedures and communication
Key roles: Organizational change leader, Change team member
Key terms:
- Organizational change: A modification in a major organizational component, such as culture, structure, or processes
Portfolio Management
Purpose: Ensure that the organization has the right mix of programmes, projects, products, and services to execute the organization's strategy within its funding and resource constraints.
Key activities:
- Ensure sound investment decisions within the organization's resource constraints
- Ensure the continual monitoring, review, and optimization of the organization's portfolios
Key metrics: ROI planned vs. actual, stakeholder satisfaction with portfolios, strategic decisions supported by portfolios, dynamics of portfolio effectiveness
Key roles: Portfolio manager, Portfolio owner, Portfolio coordinator
Key terms:
- Portfolio: A collection of assets into which an organization chooses to invest its resources in order to achieve the best return
Project Management
Purpose: Ensure that all projects in the organization are successfully delivered.
Key activities:
- Establish and maintain an effective approach to programme and project management
- Ensure the successful realization of programmes and projects
Key metrics: Satisfaction with PPM approach, deviation count and impact from agreed approach, projects completed on time and budget
Key roles: Programme manager, Project executive, Project manager, Project support, Team manager
Key terms:
- Programme: A temporary, flexible structure created to coordinate related projects and activities
- Project: A temporary organization created for the purpose of delivering one or more business products
Relationship Management
Purpose: Establish and nurture the links between the organization and its stakeholders at strategic and tactical levels.
Key activities:
- Establish and continually improve an effective approach to relationship management
- Ensure effective and healthy relationships within the organization and with external stakeholders
Key metrics: Adoption of relationship management approach, organizational climate, employee satisfaction with workplace relationships, attrition due to toxic relationships
Key roles: Relationship manager, Relationship agent
Key terms:
- Cooperation: Working with others to achieve your own goals
- Collaboration: Working with others to achieve common shared goals
Risk Management
Purpose: Ensure that the organization understands and effectively handles risks.
Key activities:
- Establish governance of risk management
- Nurture a risk management culture and identify risks
- Analyse and evaluate risks
- Treat, monitor, and review risks
Key metrics: Time since last risk appetite review, strategic risks fully documented, employees feeling safe to report risks, risks with documented treatment plan
Key roles: Risk manager, Risk owner
Key terms:
- Risk: A possible event that could cause harm or loss, or make it more difficult to achieve objectives
- Control: The means of managing a risk, ensuring that a business objective is achieved
Strategy Management
Purpose: Formulate the goals of the organization and adopt the courses of action and allocation of resources necessary for achieving those goals.
Key activities:
- Ensure that the organization's strategies are effective and sustainable
- Ensure that agreed strategies are communicated and embedded into the organization's practices and value streams
Key metrics: Stakeholder satisfaction, timeliness of strategy design/renewal, percentage of strategic objectives achieved, outdated/irrelevant strategy cases
Key roles: Strategic decision-makers, Strategic management committee
Key terms:
- Business strategy: A high-level plan that outlines an organization's purpose and long-term goals
- Digital strategy: A business strategy based on using digital technology to achieve its goals
- Vision: The defined aspiration of what an organization would like to become in the future
Product and Service Management Practices (22)
These practices are specific to the management of digital products and services.
Availability Management
Purpose: Ensure that services deliver the agreed levels of availability to meet the needs of customers and users.
Key metrics: Products/services with documented availability criteria, critical products with SLA-based availability requirements, minimum time between failures
Key roles: Availability manager
Capacity and Performance Management
Purpose: Ensure that services achieve agreed and expected performance and satisfy current and future demand in a cost-effective way.
Key metrics: New/changed services meeting capacity and performance SLA, reduction in use of legacy components causing SLA breaches
Key roles: Capacity manager
Change Enablement
Purpose: Maximize the number of successful service and product changes by ensuring that risks have been properly assessed, authorizing changes to proceed, and managing the change schedule.
Key metrics: Satisfaction with change outcomes and timeliness, change success and acceptance rate, incidents related to change
Key roles: Change manager, Change coordinator, Change authority
Deployment Management
Purpose: Move new or changed hardware, software, documentation, processes, or any other component to live environments.
Key metrics: Stakeholder satisfaction with change rate, successful deployment rate/errors, satisfaction with deployment lead time
Key roles: Deployment manager, Deployment practitioner
Key terms:
- Continuous integration: Integrating, building, and testing code within the software development environment
- Continuous delivery: Built software can be released to production at any time
- Continuous deployment: Changes go through the pipeline and are automatically put into production
IT Asset Management
Purpose: Plan and manage the full lifecycle of all IT assets.
Key metrics: Satisfaction with IT asset information, audit findings and non-compliances, IT asset financial performance (ROI, VOI, TCO)
Key roles: IT asset manager, IT asset custodian, License manager
Incident Management
Purpose: Minimize the negative impact of incidents by restoring normal service operation as quickly as possible.
Key metrics: Time to detect, diagnosis time, reassignments, first-time resolution, resolved automatically (%)
Key roles: Incident manager, Major incident manager
Key terms:
- Incident: An unplanned interruption to a service or reduction in the quality of a service
- Swarming: A technique where multiple people with different expertise work together on a task
Information Security Management
Purpose: Protect the information needed by the organization to conduct its business.
Key metrics: Products/services with documented security requirements and plans, security risks mitigated to acceptable levels, security plans tested
Key roles: Chief information security officer, Information security manager
Infrastructure and Platform Management
Purpose: Oversee the infrastructure and platforms used by an organization.
Key metrics: Satisfaction with infrastructure/platform management, alignment with strategy and architecture, infrastructure incidents
Key terms:
- Observability: An organization's ability to understand the internal state of an IT system based on the data it generates
Monitoring and Event Management
Purpose: Support the normal operation of service components by observing, analysing, and appropriately responding to changes of state.
Key metrics: Satisfaction with monitoring data and presentation, monitoring data quality, impact of event management errors
Key terms:
- Event: Any change of state that has significance for the management of a service or CI
- Threshold: The value of a metric that triggers a pre-defined response
- Alert: A notification that an action needs to be taken
Problem Management
Purpose: Reduce the likelihood and impact of incidents by identifying actual and potential causes of incidents and managing workarounds and known errors.
Key metrics: Incidents without known error, incidents prevented by problem resolution, open known errors
Key roles: Problem manager, Problem coordinator
Key terms:
- Problem: A cause, or potential cause, of one or more incidents
- Known error: A problem that has been analysed but has not been resolved
- Technical debt: The total rework backlog accumulated by choosing workarounds instead of systemic solutions
Release Management
Purpose: Make new and changed services and features available for use.
Key metrics: Satisfaction with service introduction, successful release rate/errors, adoption of release management approach
Key roles: Release Manager
Key terms:
- Release: A version of a service or CI, or collection of CIs, made available for use
Service Catalogue Management
Purpose: Provide a single source of consistent information on all services and service offerings.
Key metrics: Completeness of service catalogue, stakeholder satisfaction with catalogue content, catalogue errors
Key roles: Service catalogue manager
Service Configuration Management
Purpose: Ensure that accurate and reliable information about the configuration of services, and the CIs that support them, is available when and where needed.
Key metrics: Satisfaction with configuration information, incorrect CMDB data, verified CMDB data, cost of service configuration management
Key roles: Configuration manager, Configuration librarian
Service Continuity Management
Purpose: Ensure that the availability and performance of a service are maintained at sufficient levels in case of a disaster.
Key metrics: Products/services with documented continuity requirements, RTO achievement, RPO achievement, actual vs. expected loss ratio
Key roles: Service continuity manager
Key terms:
- Disaster: A sudden unplanned event that causes great damage or serious loss
- Vital business function: A capability or function of a business process required to ensure business success
Service Design
Purpose: Design products and services that are fit for purpose and use, and that can be delivered by the organization and its ecosystem.
Key metrics: Adherence to service design approaches, products/services meeting utility and warranty, satisfaction with innovation through design
Key roles: Service designer, Service design lead, User experience designer
Key terms:
- User-Centered Design (UCD): An approach that puts the user at the heart of the design process
- Service Design Package (SDP): Documents defining all aspects of an IT service through each lifecycle stage
Service Desk
Purpose: Capture demand for incident resolution and service requests.
Key metrics: Quality of service desk information, convenience of service desk channels, satisfaction with service desk, incorrect query triage
Key roles: Service desk manager, Service desk agent
Key terms:
- Omnichannel communications: Unified communications across multiple channels providing seamless experience
- Service empathy: The ability to recognize, understand, predict, and project the needs of another party
Service Level Management
Purpose: Set clear business-based targets for service utility, warranty, and experience, and ensure delivery is properly assessed, monitored, and managed against targets.
Key metrics: Customer satisfaction with SLA content, SLAs overdue for review, services with regular SLA reports and monitoring dashboards
Key roles: Service owner, Service level manager
Service Request Management
Purpose: Support the agreed quality of a service by handling all predefined, user-initiated service requests in an effective and user-friendly manner.
Key metrics: Service request catalogue completeness, average request fulfilment time and cost, automated request fulfilment percentage, requests fulfilled within SLA
Key terms:
- Service request: A request from a user that initiates a service action agreed as a normal part of service delivery
Service Validation and Testing
Purpose: Ensure that new or changed products and services meet defined requirements.
Key metrics: Adherence to validation and testing approaches, products/services meeting utility and warranty requirements
Key roles: Tester, Test manager, Quality specialist
Software Development and Management
Purpose: Ensure that software products meet internal and external stakeholder needs in terms of functionality, reliability, maintainability, operability, compliance, and auditability.
Key metrics: Satisfaction with development approach, compliance with internal/external policies, satisfaction with software products
Key roles: Product owner/manager, Scrum master, Delivery manager, Solution architect, Software developer, QA engineer
Key terms:
- Technical debt: The total rework backlog accumulated by choosing workarounds instead of system solutions
- Definition of Done: The agreed criteria for a proposed product or service
Supplier Management
Purpose: Ensure that the organization's suppliers and their performances are managed appropriately to support seamless provision of quality products and services.
Key metrics: Cases where strategic goals failed due to third-party dependencies, satisfaction with third-party relationships, regulatory breaches and their impact
Key roles: Supplier manager, Supplier coordinator
Workforce and Talent Management
Purpose: Ensure that the organization has the right people, with the appropriate skills and knowledge, in the correct roles to support its business objectives.
Key metrics: Strategic initiatives not supported by workforce practices, plans affected by workforce/skill gaps, attrition rate and exit reasons
Key roles: Human resource manager
Key terms:
- Employee journey: The complete end-to-end experience that an employee has with the organization
- Culture: A set of values shared by a group of people
Related pages
- Management Practices Overview (detailed practice pages)
- Practices to Value Chain Mapping (Appendix B reference)
- ITIL Roles (Appendix C reference)
- Automation Tools (Appendix D reference)