Top 5 ITIL Best Practices

ITIL continues to be the most widely adopted approach to IT Service Management in the world, and if your company will soon adhere to the ITIL framework, you'll want to know some of the best practices for implementing ITIL. Understanding the language of ITIL is critical to business, so we will break down the top 5 best rules from the ITIL framework.

Incident Management

One of ITIL's most well-known best practices is the incident management model. When companies adopt ITIL incident management, it improves incident response times, among other things. The standard ITIL method ensures that you provide quick response, analysis, documentation, ongoing management, and reporting of such incidents. With a straightforward process for documenting incidents, you can be confident that everyone in your company knows what to do if an IT issue arises and what will be done about it. ITIL incident management also has been known to improve customer satisfaction. Having prompt and efficient responses to IT issues will translate to happy customers and higher satisfaction scores.

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Problem Management

The next ITIL best practice is problem management. Problem management is the natural extension of incident management since problems are the unknown cause of one or more incidents. Problem management should have solid relationships with other IT service management processes and links to incident and change management. Problem management also needs to use configuration management to help understand the impact of problems and solutions. Some problems will require heavier investigation; however, utilizing the ITIL problem management practice, you can reduce the negative effect of business-impacting incidents through prevention or workarounds.

Change Enablement

As we continue, we look into change enablement. The change enablement practice aims to increase the number of successful IT changes by certifying that risks have been adequately assessed and that changes have been authorized and properly scheduled. The change enablement ITIL model addresses three types of change: standard change, normal change, and emergency change. The kind of change you need to implement will determine which process is used to enable it and the priority of documenting it.

Configuration Management

ITIL defines Configuration Management as the process responsible for ensuring that the assets required to deliver services are properly controlled. That accurate and reliable information about those assets is available when and wherever needed. This information includes details of how the assets have been configured and the relationships between assets. Configuration management can also be described as actions associated with a platform that automates this process at scale. ITIL's configuration management process is meant to define, identify, and understand configuration dependencies between assets no matter the choice of your ITSM framework. This best practice of ITIL is primarily integrated with all of the other ITIL processes because if data or information needs to be updated, the CMS will be the system to do so.

Asset Management

Asset and configuration management go hand in hand in the IT world. This ITIL best practice is described as the process responsible for ensuring that the assets required to deliver services are properly controlled, and the information for those assets is available to those that need it. This ITIL best practice aims to ensure that your department can identify and control all purchases across the infrastructure and manage their integrity through effective documentation, reports, and audits.

Takeaways

These top 5 ITIL best practices are merely scratching the surface of the complete list of best practices for ITIL. With 34 best practices covered in every ITIL foundations course, it's safe to say that having a subject matter expert available for questions and guidance is a must.

Visit our ITIL page for more information including, a certification roadmap, and course details.