ITIL and Service Lifecycle Stages

ITIL identifies five stages in a service lifecycle.

Here they are :

1. Service Strategy (SS)
2. Service Design (SD)
3. Service Transition (ST)
4. Service Operation (SO)
5. Continual Service Improvement (CSI)

Visually these stages can be stacked like this:

Strategy forms the core part of service lifecycle and is all about making the informed decisions on what kind of value we expect from service. Design, Transition & Operation bring the vision to reality. Design is all about creating blueprint and how it should look like once operational. Transition addresses the challenges of handover from development to operations team. Operations provides guidance on how to ensure that service keeps delivering value without interruption. Continual Service Improvement is kind of feedback loop to ensure that there is continuous focus on improving every part of service lifecycle.

We will deep dive into each of these stages in next few posts.

ITIL Overview

This is the first post of the series were I will be covering ITILv3 and its applications to the real world.

ITIL or IT Infrastructure Library is approximately 20 years old best practice, guidance or framework for doing IT Service Management (ITSM). The current version of ITIL is third major version and hence called ITILv3.

ITIL defines service as following:

A service is a means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes that customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks.

ITIL Library has the following two components:

1. ITIL Core : Generic set of best practice applicable to all types of organization (internal or external) which provide services to business.

2. ITIL Complementary Guidance : specific to industry sectors, organization types, technology, etc.

ITIL v3 addresses the complete service lifecycle and has following lifecycle stages defined:

1. Service Strategy

2. Service Design

3. Service Transition

4. Service Operation

5. Continual Service Improvement

For each stage it also describes various key processes which should be focused on and also various roles and their responsibilities.

In future posts, we will go through in detail these lifecycle stages and various processes. We will also cover how it compares to other frameworks available and how they can be used together.

ITIL Official Site : http://www.itil-officialsite.com/