The ITIL Guiding Principles
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Included in this chapter:
- Seven recommendations for every situation
- Focus on value and start where you are
- Progress iteratively, collaborate, and think holistically
- Keep it simple and practical, then optimize and automate
- How the seven work together, and the exam traps
The seven guiding principles at a glance
| Guiding principle | Core idea | In practice | Classic misread |
|---|---|---|---|
| Focus on value | Everything links, directly or indirectly, to value for stakeholders | Define value from the service consumer's perspective and map each activity to it | Judging value by the provider's cost of delivery rather than the consumer's perception |
| Start where you are | Assess and reuse the current state instead of building from scratch | Measure the current state directly, not from secondhand reports | Reading it as 'change nothing', or as 'always scrap and rebuild' |
| Progress iteratively with feedback | Organize work into small, timely iterations | Seek feedback before, during, and after each iteration | Waiting for one big-bang delivery with feedback only at the end |
| Collaborate and promote visibility | Involve the right people and make the work visible | Cross boundaries for buy-in; surface progress and consequences | Assuming more participants is always better than the right people |
| Think and work holistically | Treat services, practices, and suppliers as one system | Coordinate the parts; no element stands alone | Optimizing one part in isolation and harming end-to-end value |
| Keep it simple and practical | Use the fewest steps that achieve the outcome | Remove any step, action, or metric that adds no value | Confusing 'simple' with 'easy' (simplifying is often hard) |
| Optimize and automate | Make the best use of people and technology | Optimize as far as possible first, then automate where it adds value | Automating a wasteful process instead of fixing it first |
Cheat sheet
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