ITIL 4 CDS Student March 2021 - Compressed

ITIL 4 Create Deliver Support Course
Student Handbook
Ver. 4.0
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ITIL 4 CDS STUDENT MANUAL
The Swirl logo™ is a trade mark of AXELOS Limited, used under permission of AXELOS Limited. All
rights reserved
• Copyright © AXELOS Limited 2021. Used under permission of AXELOS Limited. All rights
reserved.
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of Ducisgroup.com.
• Permission can be requested at www.ducisgroup.com
• ITIL® 4 Create, Deliver and Support course on these pages are offered by Ducisgroup.com
Copyright © AXELOS Limited 2021. Used under permission of AXELOS Limited. All rights reserved
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................................. 5
ITIL 4 Certification Scheme .......................................................................................................................5
THE ITIL 4 Create, Deliver and Support .....................................................................................................7
About the Syllabi .....................................................................................................................................8
Class Introduction ..................................................................................................................................10
Course Overview ...................................................................................................................................11
About the Certification examination ......................................................................................................11
ITIL 4 Foundation Brief Re-Cap ............................................................................................................... 12
1. Plan & Build a Service Value Stream for CDS .............................................................................. 19

1.1 Concepts and challenges .................................................................................................................. 19
a) Organisational structure ............................................................................................................................ 19
b) Integrated/collaborative teams ................................................................................................................ 22
c) Team capabilities, roles, competencies ..................................................................................................... 25
d) Team culture and differences ................................................................................................................... 28
e) Working to a customer-orientated mindset ............................................................................................. 31
f) Employee satisfaction management .......................................................................................................... 35
g) The value of positive communications ...................................................................................................... 37
1.2 Using a ‘shift left’ approach .............................................................................................................. 40
1.3 Planning and managing resources in the service value system ........................................................... 42
a) Team collaboration and integration .......................................................................................................... 42
b) Workforce planning ................................................................................................................................... 42
c) Results based measuring and reporting .................................................................................................... 46
d) The culture of continual improvement ..................................................................................................... 47
1.4 Value of IT across the service value system: ...................................................................................... 49
a) Integrated service management toolsets ................................................................................................. 49
b) Integration and data sharing ..................................................................................................................... 51
c) Reporting and advanced analytics ............................................................................................................. 53
d) Collaboration and workflow ...................................................................................................................... 57
e) Robotic process automation (RPA) ........................................................................................................... 60
f) Artificial intelligence and machine learning ............................................................................................... 63
g) Continuous integration and delivery/deployment (CI/CD) ....................................................................... 68
h) Information models .................................................................................................................................. 72
2. Contribution of ITIL Practices in CDS .......................................................................................... 75

2.1 Using a value stream to design, develop and transition new services ................................................. 76
2.2 Contribution of ITIL practices to a value stream for a new service ...................................................... 99
a) Service design ............................................................................................................................................ 99
b) Software development and Management .............................................................................................. 102
c) Deployment management ....................................................................................................................... 104
d) Release management .............................................................................................................................. 106
e) Service Validation and testing ................................................................................................................. 107
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f) Change Enablement ................................................................................................................................. 109
2.3 Using a value stream to provide user support ................................................................................. 112
2.4 Contribution of ITIL practices to a value stream for user support ..................................................... 120
a) Service desk ............................................................................................................................................. 120
b) Incident management ............................................................................................................................. 122
c) Problem management ............................................................................................................................. 124
d) Knowledge management ........................................................................................................................ 126
e) Service level management ...................................................................................................................... 128
f) Monitoring and event management ........................................................................................................ 130
3 Creating, Delivering & Supporting Services ............................................................................... 131

3.1 Coordinating and prioritizing activities ............................................................................................ 132
a) Managing queues and backlogs .............................................................................................................. 132
b) Prioritizing work ...................................................................................................................................... 134
3.2 Value of the service value system ................................................................................................... 140
a) Buy vs build considerations ..................................................................................................................... 140
b) Sourcing options ...................................................................................................................................... 144
c) Service integration and management (SIAM) ......................................................................................... 145
Glossary of Terms ....................................................................................................................... 149

Sample Test One......................................................................................................................... 152
Sample Test Answers ........................................................................................................................... 163
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INTRODUCTION
ITIL 4 Certification Scheme
The ITIL 4 Foundation would be the Certification at the beginner level. It is a pre-requisite for any
professional desirous moving to the advanced levels. On successful completion of the ITIL
Foundation level
ITIL Managing Professional (ITIL MP) targets IT practitioners working within technology and
digital teams across businesses. The Managing Professional (MP) stream provides practical and
technical knowledge about how to run successful IT projects, teams and workflows.
ITIL Strategic Leader (ITIL SL) recognizes the value of ITIL, not just for IT operations, but for all
digitally enabled services. Becoming an ITIL Strategic Leader (ITIL SL) demonstrates that the
professional has a clear understanding of how IT influences and directs business strategy.
To obtain the designation ITIL Managing Professional or ITIL Strategic Leader, the professional
must complete all modules in each stream, with ITIL Strategist DPI being a common module for
both streams.
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There are four ITIL 4 Specialist publications, which build on the concepts introduced in ITIL 4
Foundation. Each of these publications focuses on a different aspect of service management.
ITIL 4 Create, Deliver and Support addresses the cultural and team management aspects of
product and service management; provides an overview of the tools and technologies which
support service management; and demonstrates how to integrate management practices into
end-to-end value streams.
ITIL 4 Drive Stakeholder Value provides guidance on establishing, maintaining, and developing
effective service relationships at appropriate levels. It leads organizations on a service journey in
their service provider and consumer roles, supporting effective interaction and communication.
ITIL 4 High Velocity IT addresses the specifics of digital transformation and helps organizations
to evolve towards a convergence of business and technology, or to establish a new digital
organization.
ITIL 4 Direct, Plan and Improve helps to align product and service management with modern
business
requirements; drive successful organizational transformation; and embed continual
improvement into an organization’s behaviour at every level.
The ITIL 4 Specialist publications are supported by the ITIL management practice guides, which
provide detailed practical recommendations for all 34-general management, service
management, and technical management practices. They include pragmatic, hands-on guidance
that can be applied in the context of all four ITIL 4 Specialist publications
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THE ITIL 4 Create, Deliver and Support
The purpose of the ITIL 4 Create, Deliver and Support Qualification examination is:
• to provide the candidate with an understanding on how to integrate different value

streams and activities to create, deliver and support IT-enabled products and services,
and relevant practices, methods and tools
• to provide the candidate with an understanding of service performance, service quality
and improvement methods.
The purpose of the ITIL 4 Create, Deliver and Support Qualification to assess whether the
candidate can demonstrate sufficient understanding and application of ITIL 4 to the creation,
delivery and support of services, as described in the syllabus below, to be awarded the ITIL 4
Create, Deliver and Support qualification. The ITIL 4 Create, Deliver and Support qualification is
one of the pre-requisites for the designation of ITIL 4 Managing Professional which assesses the
candidate’s practical and technical knowledge about how to run successful, modern IT-enabled
services, teams and workflows.
The target audience for this qualification is:
• individuals continuing their journey in service management

• ITSM managers and aspiring ITSM managers
• ITSM practitioners managing the operation of IT-enabled & digital products and services,
and those responsible for the end-to-end delivery
• existing ITIL qualification holders wishing to develop their knowledge.
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About the Syllabi
Candidates who want to understand practices in detail should read these in their own time
The detailed breakup of the syllabi along with Marks distribution is given below
No.
marks
Learning Outcome Assessment Criteria
1.1 Understand the concepts and challenges relating to
the following across the service value system:
a) Organisational structure
b) Integrated/collaborative teams
4
c) Team capabilities, roles, competencies
d) Team culture and differences
e) Working to a customer-orientated mindset
f) Employee satisfaction management
g) The value of positive communications
1.2 Understand how to use a ‘shift left’ approach 3
1.3 Know how to plan and manage resources in the
service value system:
1. Understand how
to plan and build a
a) Team collaboration and integration 4
service value stream
to create, deliver and b) Workforce planning
support services c) Results based measuring and reporting
d) The culture of continual improvement
1.4 Understand the use and value of information and
technology across the service value system:
a) Integrated service management toolsets

b) Integration and data sharing
c) Reporting and advanced analytics
4
d) Collaboration and workflow
e) Robotic process automation (RPA)
f) Artificial intelligence and machine learning
g) Continuous integration and delivery/deployment
(CI/CD)
h) Information models
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2.1. Know how to use a value stream to design, develop
3
and transition new services
2.2 Know how the following ITIL practices contribute to
a value stream for a new service
a) Service design
b) Software development and Management 5
c) Deployment management
2. Know how
d) Release management
relevant
ITIL practices e) Service Validation and testing
contribute to f) Change Enablement
creation, delivery 2.3 Know how to use a value stream to provide user
3
and support across support
the SVS and value 2.4 Know how the following ITIL practices contribute to
5
streams a value stream for user support
a) Service desk
b) Incident management
c) Problem management
d) Knowledge management
e) Service level management
f) Monitoring and event management
3.1 Know how to co-ordinate, prioritize and structure
work and activities to create deliver and support
services, including:
5
a) Managing queues and backlogs

3. Know how to
b) Prioritizing work
create, deliver and
3.2 Understand the use and value of the following
support services
across the service value system:
4
a) Buy vs build considerations
b) Sourcing options
c) Service integration and management (SIAM)
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Class Introduction
Instructor Introduction
Student Introduction
Students are requested to share with the class:
• Name
• Profession
• Role
• Background in IT
• Familiarity with ITIL
• Expectations from the course
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Course Overview
This Module provides guidance for professionals in IT and service management who are required
to build and maintain a broad professional portfolio. In many cases, the content of these sections
may be familiar, as they relate to: communications, people, organizational structure, and staying
aware of new opportunities. These particular areas are emphasized in ITIL 4 because they are as
important for success as processes, practices, and technical knowledge.
To be successful in the provision of IT and digitally-enabled products and services, it is important

to develop understanding and practical application of a broad range of guidance. The content in
this course is written as an introduction with the aim of helping the development of the reader’s
professional expertise
AXELOS®, ITIL® and the swirl logo are registered trademarks of AXELOS Limited.
Reproduction of this material requires the permission of AXELOS Limited
About the Certification examination
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Type Multiple Choice, 40 questions. Each question is worth one
mark.
Duration Maximum 90 Minutes for all candidates

Provision for Candidates completing an exam in a language that is not
additional time their mother tongue have a maximum of 105 minutes to
relating to Language complete the exam and are allowed the use of a dictionary
Pre-requisite The Pre-requisite is ITIL 4 Foundation Certificate
Supervised Yes
Open Book No
Pass Score 28/40 or 70%
Delivery This exam is available in an Online or Paper based format
ITIL 4 Foundation Brief Re-Cap
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The key components of the ITIL 4 framework are the ITIL service value system (SVS) and the four
dimensions’ model.
The ITIL service value system
The ITIL SVS represents how the various components and activities of the organization work
together to facilitate value creation through IT-enabled services. The structure of the ITIL SVS is
shown below
The core components of the ITIL SVS are:
• the ITIL service value chain

• the ITIL practices
• the ITIL guiding principles
• governance
• continual improvement
The ITIL service value chain
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The central element of the SVS is the service value chain, an operating model which outlines the
key activities required to respond to demand and facilitate value realization through the creation
and management of products and services. The service value chain is shown in Figure below.
The ITIL service value chain includes six value chain activities which lead to the creation of
products and services and, in turn, value. The activities are:
• plan
• improve
• engage
• design and transition
• obtain/build
• deliver and support.
The ITIL practices
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Practices are sets of organizational resources designed for performing work or accomplishing an
objective. The ITIL SVS includes 14 general management practices, 17 service management
practices, and three technical management practices. These are outlined in Table below
Technical
General management Service management
management
practices practices
practices
Deployment
Architecture management Availability management management
Infrastructure and
Continual improvement Business analysis platform management
Information security Capacity and performance Software development
management management and management
Knowledge management Change enablement
Measurement and
reporting Incident management
Organizational change
management IT asset management
Monitoring and event
Portfolio management management
Project management Problem management
Relationship management Release management
Service catalogue
Risk management management
Service financial Service configuration
management management
Service continuity
Strategy management management
Supplier management Service design
Workforce and talent
management Service desk
Service level management
Service request
management
Service validation and
testing
The ITIL guiding principles
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The ITIL guiding principles are recommendations that can guide an organization in all
circumstances, regardless of changes in its goals, strategies, type of work, or management
structure. The seven ITIL guiding principles are:
• Focus on value: Everything that the organization does needs to map, directly or indirectly,
to value for the stakeholders.
• Start where you are: Do not start from scratch and build something new without
considering what is already available to be leveraged.
• Progress iteratively with feedback: Do not attempt to do everything at once.
• Collaborate and promote visibility: Working together across boundaries produces results
that have greater buy-in, more relevance to objectives, and increased likelihood of long-
term success.
• Think and work holistically: No service, or element used to provide a service, stands
alone.
• Keep it simple and practical: If a process, service, action, or metric fails to provide value
or produce a useful outcome, eliminate it.
• Optimize and automate: Resources of all types, particularly HR, should be used to their
best effect.
Governance
Governance is the means by which an organization is directed and controlled. The role and
position of governance in the ITIL SVS will vary depending on how the SVS is applied in an
organization.
Continual improvement
Continual improvement is a recurring organizational activity performed at all levels to ensure

that an organization’s performance continually meets stakeholders’ expectations. ITIL 4 supports
continual improvement with the ITIL continual improvement model, outlined in Figure
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The four dimensions’ model
To support a holistic approach to service management, ITIL defines four dimensions that
collectively are critical to the effective and efficient facilitation of value for customers and other
stakeholders in the form of products and services. The four dimensions (are:
• organizations and people
• information and technology
• partners and suppliers
• value streams and processes.
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The four dimensions represent perspectives which are relevant to the whole SVS, including the
entirety of the service value chain and all ITIL practices. The four dimensions are constrained or
influenced by several external factors that are often beyond the control of the SVS.
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1. Plan & Build a Service Value Stream for CDS
1.1 Concepts and challenges
a) Organisational structure
Create Deliver and Support covers the integration of several proven areas of ‘IT’ work
• Design
• build and test
• Launch
• Run and support of products and services
The core proposition of ITIL 4 is that this work is all part of a single value chain, with a variety of
different types of work passing through it (referred to as value streams). From a business or
customer perspective all of this work is a single entity and there should not be any divisions or
‘silos’ involved in delivering it.
The ‘ITIL - best practice’ processes have evolved developed over the years. These have included
commercial tools, methods, benchmarks, sourcing models and more. While many approaches
have been successfully applied over the years, a distraction has been at times a doctrinarian
approach of “ITIL Says”.
Therefore, there is a need to re-focus on the key contributing factors that deliver success with
service management – people management, customer focus, communications, organizational
structure, people-skills and capabilities, team dynamics and culture.
ITIL defines an organization as “a person or a group of people that has its own functions
with responsibilities, authorities, and relationships to achieve its objectives.”
Service relationships require many varied interactions between individuals and groups within
and between organizations. Individuals and organizational structures:
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• interact with information and technology
• participate in value streams and processes
• work with partners and suppliers.
An important decision is how to group the individuals to create, deliver and support products
and services. Different organizations may have different organizational structures. Some are
hierarchical; others more closely resemble a network or matrix. Many organizations arrange
individuals by their specialized activities, skills, expertise, and resources. Though this is a common
approach, it can lead to the individuals working in isolated silos, with little understanding of what
others do or how they do it. Cross-functional structures may share a focus on the product and/or
service for which they are responsible, but they can leave the organization without a
comprehensive overview of their portfolio, which may result in duplicated efforts/services. The
typical organizational structure of an organization comprises of the following:
• Functional
• Divisional
• Matrix
• Flat
• Functional: These are typically hierarchical arrangements of lines of authority or technical

capability. These determine how power, roles and responsibilities are assigned, and how
work is managed across different management levels. The organization may be divided
into internal groups based on functional areas e.g. HR, IT, finance, marketing, etc.
• Divisional: Divisionally based organisations arrange their activities around market,
product or geographical groups. Each division may have its own profit and loss
accounting, sales and marketing, engineering, production, etc.
• Matrix: The structure in which the reporting relationships are set up as a grid, or matrix,
with pools of people who can move across teams as needed. Employees often have dual
reporting relationships - generally to both a functional manager and to a functional (or
performance) manager, and to a product, project, or programme of work
• Flat: Some organisations aim to remove hierarchies of authority and management. This
can be useful by removing barriers of decision making that can slow down progress. As
organisations grow and more teams are required to manage specific responsibilities, this
this can become challenging to maintain.
• Hierarchical, formal lines of authority, determine power,

Functional
roles and responsibilities
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• Often based on functional areas like HR, IT finance,
marketing etc.
• Based on markets, products, geography etc.
Divisional • Each division may have profit & loss accounting, sales,
marketing, engineering, etc.
• Grid of relationships
• Pools of people who move across teams.
Matrix
• Often has dual reporting lines (e.g. functional and product)
• Can provide more speed and agility
• Very little hierarchy
• Removes decision making barriers, enabling fast decisions
Flat
• Challenging to maintain as organization grows
The key differences between the various organizational structures can be described using the
following characteristics:
• grouping/teaming criteria
• location (co-located/distributed)
• relation to value streams (responsible for specific steps or fully responsible for the end-
to-end value stream)
• team members’ responsibility and authority
• sourcing of competencies
Historically, organisational structures have generally been functional and hierarchical in nature,
with military style lines of command and control.
In the digital service economy, the need for agility and at the same time resilience has become
vital for organizations’ success. In order to fulfil this need, organizations are adopting new ways
of structuring resources and competences.
In keeping with changing times and the need to adapt to more flexible and responsive ways of
working such as Agile and DevOps, organisations have adopted new approaches to organisational
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structure, which is more ‘servant’ and cross-functional – often this involves more applications of
matrix and flat structures.
Servant leadership: Leadership that is focused on explicit support of people in their

roles
Servant leadership is based on 2 key principles - that managers are:
• There to meet the needs of the organization first and foremost (not just their individual
teams)
• That to do that they are there to ‘serve’ and support the people working for them by
ensuring that they have the relevant resources and organisational support to get their
jobs done.
In Servant leadership
• Managers focus on the needs of the organization, not just their team
• Managers ‘serve’ and support the people they lead by ensuring they have the right
resources and support
• Often used with cross-functional/matrix organization structure
• Cross-functional organizations use combinations of matrix and flat structures
If you’re thinking of moving to a cross-functional servant model the “ITIL guiding principles” could
help you. This cross functional will involve major organizational and cultural change
b) Integrated/collaborative teams
There has been a lot of attention over the last few years on collaboration and teamwork.
Cooperation is working with others to achieve your goals, which may be part of a
common goal.
Collaboration is ‘the action of working with someone to produce or create

something’.
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Cooperation and collaboration are vital for effective and valuable teamwork and service
relationships. Collaboration is especially useful for creative and entrepreneurial work in a
complex environment. Cooperation is important for standardized work with a clear separation of
duties, especially where people from multiple organizations are working together. Collaboration
is typically used in start-ups as the shared idea of the organization’s mission unites individuals
and inspires them to collaborate. In attempts to adopt start-up culture for larger organizations,
leaders often aim to move to collaborative teamwork, and often fail.
In an HBR article titled, “There’s a difference between cooperation and collaboration,” it was
argued “… Managers mistake cooperativeness for being collaborative,” adding, “… most
managers are cooperative, friendly, willing to share information – but lack the ability and
flexibility to align their goals and resources with others in real time.”
Understanding what cooperation and collaboration mean; needs to be agreed and the
behaviours necessary for effective teamwork defined, recognized, and reinforced. The table
details the differences between collaboration and cooperation
Collaboration Cooperation
Work together towards a shared
Separate goals can lead to silo working
goal / objective
Shared and integrated goals Aligned goals
Individuals and teams succeed
Everyone succeeds or fails together
independently
Goals and resources aligned in real Cooperative, friendly, willing to share
time information
Technology is necessary but not Technology is necessary but not
sufficient sufficient
Needs respect, trust and
Less need for trust and transparency
transparency
Needs multi-channel
communication (standups, face-to-
Needs effective communication
face, active listening, tool-
mediated, etc.)
Everyone needs to understand how Everyone needs to understand their
they contribute to the big picture own role
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Collaboration Cooperation
Need to understand PESTLE factors Need to understand PESTLE factors for
for all stakeholders own role
Aligning to type of work
Behavioural science enables us to define any of the pieces of work underpinning the operation
of a service or product as either - algorithmic or heuristic.
• An algorithmic task involves a person following a defined process, driven by a set of

established instructions, along a consistent pathway until the work is concluded.
• Heuristic work, conversely, is fundamentally more dependent on human inventiveness.
’Heuristic’ involves enabling a person to discover or learn something for themselves
The table below provides the subtle differences between Algorithmic tasks and Heuristic work
Algorithmic tasks Heuristic work

Follows a defined process, with Depends on human understanding
established instructions and intervention
Follow the rules Learn or discover what is needed
Clear inputs, outputs, instructions, Needs flexibility, information,
branches etc. knowledge and experience
Reassignment and handover between Collaboration, swarming and DevOps
teams where needed often appropriate
People doing the work may recognize New insights can be recorded for
opportunities to improve how it is future use, moving some work to
done. This should be part of their role. algorithmic (removing ‘toil’)
Toil: Work that is manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, linearly
scaling
Behavioural science enables us to define any of the pieces of work underpinning the operation
of a service or product as either (1) algorithmic or (2) heuristic.
1. An algorithmic task involves a person following a defined process, driven by a set of

established instructions, along a consistent pathway until the work is concluded.
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2. Heuristic work, conversely, is fundamentally more dependent on human inventiveness.
’Heuristic’ involves enabling a person to discover or learn something for themselves
c) Team capabilities, roles, competencies
Technology has moved into the centre of business. As such it is becoming a mainstream business
function, the requirements for IT and technology people and roles are correspondingly seeking
more generic business and management competencies. Traditional IT roles were technically
focussed in areas such as programming, business analysis, technical support, designers etc.
Newer roles require more flexibility and regular change. Many IT and ITSM roles now require
business skills such as:
• Ability to manage and motivate a team

• Relationship management
• Negotiation
• Supplier and contract management
A role is a set of responsibilities, activities and authorizations granted to a person or team,

in a specific context.
A single person may, as part of their job, fulfil many different roles. A single role may be
contributed to by several people.
A job is a position within an organization that is assigned to a specific person.
In the present work environment Service Managers are required to use several commercial skills
to specify, buy, negotiate and manage these relationships. Skills in procurement and contract
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management are in high demand. A business and entrepreneurial mind-set is becoming more of
a requirement, even within internal service management organisations. This is required to
identify new ways of working, delivering services and solving problems, which may exploit new
technologies or also which may involve creative and innovative thinking and customer
interaction. Thus, Professional ITSM competencies include:
Business and commercial skills
• Specify, buy, negotiate, manage supplier relationships

• Get people together and motivate/agree way forward
• Write and promote/sell a business case
• Produce marketing/promotional materials, present and ‘sell’ services
Relationship management skills
• Contact/liaison
• demand capture
• value demonstration
• feedback
• communication flow
Innovation
• Entrepreneurial mindset
• identify new ways of working
• Problem solving skills
• Ability to exploit new technologies
The other Professional ITSM competencies include
• Communication skills
o Written & verbal, ability to establish working relationships
o Essential for working with colleagues, customers, managers and all other stakeholders
• Market and organization knowledge
o Knowledge of specific industry, including competitors, relative costs and capabilities
• Management and administration
o Delegation, documentation, logistics, building teams, recruit and develop staff
• Leadership
o Ability to influence, motivate and support
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o Anyone can be a leader, it’s not just managers
o Every team needs some leaders to help create the required culture
A broad set of competencies can be developed by:
• Specific training - business analysis, programming, ITIL etc.

• Job descriptions that include full technical and non-technical skills
• Recognizing non-IT experience (team management, procurement, etc.)
• Including ‘soft’ skills like communication and leadership in role descriptions
• Performance management, rewards and appraisals reflect full range of skills
• Opportunities for training and development in all areas
• Encouraging CPD (Continuing professional development)
• Role based models, based on job descriptions, with career paths
• Competency based models focussed on generic capabilities
• Hybrid role and competency based models combining both
Professional IT and service management competencies
The structuring and naming of roles differs between organizations. The roles defined in ITIL are
neither compulsory nor recommended. The ITIL practice guides describe each role using a
competency profile based on the model shown in table below:
Competency code Competency profile (activities and skills)
Leader Decision-making, delegating, overseeing other

L activities, providing incentives and motivation, and
evaluating outcomes.
Administrator Assigning and prioritizing tasks, record-
А keeping, ongoing reporting, and initiating basic
improvements.
Coordinator/communicator Coordinating multiple
C parties, maintaining communication between
stakeholders, and running awareness campaigns.
Methods and techniques expert Designing and
implementing work techniques, documenting
М
procedures, consulting on processes, work analysis,
and continual improvement.
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Technical expert Providing technical (IT) expertise and
Т
conducting expertise-based assignments.
d) Team culture and differences
Team culture is how people work together towards a common goal and how they treat each
other. These attributes could be positive or negative. While teams can have different cultures;
all are influenced by overall organization culture
Team Culture: A team culture is made up of the values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours
shared by a team.
Culture is a difficult concept to grasp because it’s generally unspoken and unwritten. It’s about
dynamics between humans. Different teams within a company can manifest their own culture.
But they’re generally influenced by the company culture as a whole. Often it is the unwritten –
‘how we do things here’ – or ‘how we’ve always done things here’
In an effective team culture, team members understand where the work of their team fits in the
total context of their organization's strategic plan and success goals. The characteristics can be
summarized as:
• Team members understand how the team contributes to the organization

• People feel that they are part of something bigger than themselves
• Engagement and work satisfaction are increased
• People understand how they can achieve personal AND organization goals
Organizations need strong, collaborative teams at all levels mutually responsible for shared
outcomes. Teams need to have a strong and agreed shared vision, with good and open
communication giving and receiving feedback from each other. They need to understand their
impact on each other while continually learning and improving, removing barriers to success.
Service provider organizations focusing on value creation will display these common
characteristics:
• Value, quality and operational excellence focus

• Client, customer and consumer orientation
• Investment in people and communication/collaborative tools
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• Strong team composition within a structured organization
• Continuous alignment with the vision, mission and strategic objectives.
What does good look team culture look like? It is where:
• People collaborate, share knowledge, and support each other

• Feel safe, speak up and accept challenges
• Trust and empowerment
Cultural fit, what is it?
• People’s beliefs, values and needs match the work environment

• Diversity
What does bad culture look like?
• Many rules and processes

• Lack of empowerment and autonomy
• Results in poor quality products and services
It is possible to grow and evolve a team’s culture over time. It all starts with honestly identifying
where the team is now and the desired outcome and future state that desired for it. Change
requires ownership and action as a united team. These are simple guidelines for a positive team
culture:
• We need to create and share a vision

• Meet regularly – discuss problems, build relationships
• Create leaders, not managers. Mentoring, leading by example
• Encourage informal teams
• Cross-training to provide overall organizational understanding
• Social integration – get to know people personally
• Provide feedback
• Promote a culture of learning
What does cultural fit mean and why is it important?
Cultural fit is the ability for an employee or a team to comfortably work in an environment that
corresponds with their own beliefs, values, and needs. Therefore, an employee deemed a good
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cultural fit is more likely to enjoy their work and their workplace, be happier, commit long term,
and be more productive, and more engaged.
Having a diverse approach supports good culture as it allows the team or organization to see
their work from a broader perspective. Each person brings their unique combination of
experience, perspective, skills, and knowledge to the team. The team is thus greater than the
sum of its individual parts.
There are pitfalls while hiring for cultural fit, as bias can creep in as human nature is to gravitate
towards like-minded individuals with a similar personality or beliefs.
How to develop and nurture good team culture
It is possible to grow and evolve a team’s culture over time. Firstly, this will require identifying
the team’s current culture and deciding what the desired future outcome is. Change requires
ownership and action as a united team. This is a lot easier with good leadership and supportive
management. ITIL guiding principles and the continual improvement model can be very useful
tools for implementing change.
The following are simple guidelines for a positive team culture:
• Incorporating the vision into the team culture

• Regular meetings
• Create leaders
• Encouraging informal teams
• Cross-training employees
• Integrating socially
• Providing feedback
• Promoting a culture of learning
These are some guidelines and recommendations. Some may not be relevant in certain
organizations or in some context. should be reviewed and adapted to fit regional, national, and
organizational characteristics.
A continual improvement culture
A culture of continual improvement is important as it helps with the following:
• Improves customer experience

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• Embeds good practice
• Reduces costs
• Improves operational efficiency
• Develops employee experiences
• Accelerates delivery
• Removes waste and repetitive tasks
• Reduces risk
Continual improvement does not happen by itself, or simply because there is a process or
workflow defined for it, or because there is an improvement register in place.
The real benefit of continual improvement comes when the organization has a culture that
supports, promotes, and empowers all parties to implement continual improvement in their daily
work. Continual improvement should not be thought of as a tool or process. It should be
embedded in the culture of the organization.
A collaborative culture
Cooperation means working with others to achieve shared goals. There is a risk that individuals
or teams who are cooperating instead work in silos. As a result, the individual or team goals are
achieved but the organizational goals are missed.
Collaboration is the process through which a person works with others to create or achieve a
common goal or product. From a business perspective, collaboration is a practice where
individuals work together to achieve a common, shared goal/objective.
Cooperation and collaboration are vital for effective and valuable teamwork and service
relationships. Collaboration is especially useful for creative and entrepreneurial work in a
complex environment. Cooperation is important for standardized work with a clear separation of
duties, especially where people from multiple organizations are working together.
Collaboration is typically used in start-ups as the shared idea of the organization’s mission unites
individuals and inspires them to collaborate. In attempts to adopt start-up culture for larger
organizations, leaders often aim to move to collaborative teamwork, and often fail.
e) Working to a customer-orientated mindset
Customer orientation - Putting the customer first

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A customer-oriented organization places customer satisfaction at the core of each of its

business decisions. Customer orientation is defined as an approach to sales and customer-
relations in which staff focus on helping customers to meet their long-term needs and
wants.
Essentially this means observing the wishes and needs of the customer, anticipating them and
then acting accordingly. Studies have shown that satisfied, loyal and committed employees are
more enthusiastic towards customers, which ultimately leads to more satisfied, loyal and
committed customers.
This relationship is a key enabler as part of the service value chain.
Roughly described: the more enthusiastic and engaged the employees, the more loyalty will be
earned with the customer, and the higher the profits or success in reaching objectives.
A service mindset is an outlook that focuses on creating customer value, loyalty and trust. An
organisation with this outlook aims to go beyond simply providing a product or service. It wants
to create a positive and indelible imprint in its customer's, or prospect’s, mind. To do this, a
business has to care about the customer or prospect experience and work continuously at
enhancing it.
Business relationship managers, service and support staff and service owners are front-line
communicators of a company's customer-orientation. However, efforts to implement customer-
orientation strategies should encompass a strong training component for all employees
occupying customer contact or cross functional roles. This also requires staff to be empowered
to use a wider range of individual initiatives to solve customer problems.
For example, a service engineer for a computer products retailer might be empowered to resolve
product defects at a customers' work site under certain conditions. The engineer therefore must
be aware of at least basic principles of professional communications and customer service, as
his/her approach influences a customer's perception of the company'.
The success of an organisation is dependent on the way in which it anticipates the wishes and
needs of its customers. For most organisations, customers are crucial for survival. Customer
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orientation should therefore also be an important focus of an employee or team. In competitive
markets the emphasis should be not just on the winning, but also on the retention, of loyal and
profitable customers.
Customer expectation and orientation is essential for success. Gaining insight into the
expectations and satisfaction of customers enables organizations to find new ways to deliver and
improve services. Monitoring customer satisfaction produces important information that makes
it possible improve the way services are delivered. When it is clear to your organization what
customers are or are not satisfied with, clear objectives and improvements can be implemented.
Service desk is now a practice, so we must be careful about saying “service desk teams”.
Customer mind-set is required beyond front line staff. It is the designer putting the needs of the
customer first, on the product manager prioritizing value-adding features, it is the release
manager understanding how a release will impact existing customers.
Customer expectation and orientation is essential for success. Gaining insight into the
expectations and satisfaction of customers enables organizations to find new ways to deliver and
improve services. The customer oriented approach has the following characteristics:
• Place customers at the core of business decisions

• Observe and anticipate the wishes and needs of customers
• Care about customer experience and continually enhance it
• Don’t just create products & services, create a positive impact on customers
• Every customer is unique, understand their individual needs and wants
• ‘Focus on value’
It is critical to the success of service relationship that all involved in the service provision and
consumption act responsibly, considering the interests of others and focusing on the agreed
service outcomes. This can be called ‘service empathy’
Service empathy: “The ability to recognize, understand, predict, and project interests, needs,
intentions and experience of another party, in order to establish, maintain and improve service
relationship.”
Service empathy is cognitive, where a person can relate. An example can be where service
support agent is not expected to share user’s frustration; but it is expected that he (or she) is
able to recognize and understand it, express sympathy and adjust support actions accordingly.
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Service empathy is an element of service mindset, but not the only one. Service mindset also
includes shared principles that drive organization’s behavior and define organization’s attitude
towards the service relationship and other parties involved.
Service Mindset: An important component of organizational culture, which defines

organization’s behaviour in service relationships. Service mindset includes shared values and
guiding principles adopted and followed by the organization.
Customer experience
Adopting a customer-oriented strategy is key to success. Customer orientation puts the customer
at the beginning, centre and end of every transaction. It shifts the organization’s focus from the
product to the customer, meaning the organization must have a deep understanding of the
customer’s needs and expectations. Organizations must be able to deliver the strategy
throughout the various stages of the service and customer lifecycle. From trainee to CEO, it is
important that every employee in the organization is completely committed to the strategy.
Everyone has an important part to play when it comes to customer service and retention. Steps
to help an organization become customer oriented:
• Create a customer value proposition (CVP). This should be a simple short statement of
what is delivered to the customer and how it delivers value for them. This defines at the
strategic level the expected benefits, which are promised to be delivered to the customer,
in return for their loyalty.
• Map the customer experience journey – this involves looking at the whole end-to-end
experience of dealing with the service organization, seen from the customer or user’s
perspective. ‘Touchpoints’ are the various events and times when the customer interacts
with the service organization – From demand through to build, test and delivery.
• Recruit customer-friendly people. Hire people for their attitude, train them for skills is
the approach here. Empathy, good communication and problem-solving abilities are the
qualities to look for.
• Treat employees well. How your employees feel at work has a major impact on how they
deal with customers.
• Train and coach teams. All parts of the organization should gain a full understanding of
the customer, product and industry they support. Formal training and on-the-job
coaching must also focus on the ‘soft’ skills; communications, teamwork, positive
influencing, writing skills, business and administrative skills.
• Walk the talk. Senior managers must embrace the customer service concept and take to
the frontline and meet directly with users and customers periodically. Companies with
the best customer-orientated culture value ‘servant leadership’ where senior managers
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exist to provide guidance and direction, but the employees are empowered to make
decisions on their own.
• Listen to the Voice of the Customer (VOC). An honest appraisal of progress from
customers is critical. This can be achieved by conducting surveys, having direct meetings
and by gathering customer comments.
• Use a broad set of inputs and channels for feedback data. Balanced scorecards of metrics
can measure performance across a range of customer experience elements to drive
improvements, e.g. key business outcome delivery, customer satisfaction, net promoter
score, SLA performance, service availability.
• Empower staff. Make sure customer facing teams have the authority to carry out
requests, make changes or resolve common customer complaints without further
escalation. Also avoid silo mentality by encouraging different departments and functions
to work closely together.
f) Employee satisfaction management
The true potential of an organization can only be realized when the productivity of individuals
and teams are aligned, and their activities integrated to achieve the goals of the organization.
Happy and satisfied staff are needed for happy and satisfied customers. So, organizations need
to measure employee satisfaction to understand how well they are meeting the employees’
changing needs and expectations.
Employee morale and engagement can influence productivity, employee retention, and
customer satisfaction and loyalty. They need to be monitored and managed on an ongoing basis.
Employee satisfaction surveys can measure many attributes: leadership, culture, morale,
organizational climate, culture, the organizational structure, and job activities.
Employee needs and expectations continue to change, so organizations need to conduct

employee satisfaction measures that gather regular feedback, to understand how well they are
meeting employee needs and expectations.
There are three aspects to this:
• Understanding
• Measurement
• Improvement
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Employee morale and engagement can influence productivity, employee retention, and
customer satisfaction and loyalty. They need to be monitored and managed on an ongoing basis.
Employee satisfaction surveys can measure many attributes: leadership, culture, morale,
organizational climate, culture, the organizational structure, and job activities.
Without measurement, we don’t know if there is improvement; we don’t know what is

meaningful.
The following are the various feedback types for measurement of employee measurement
Employee surveys – these are can be run locally or at organisational level (see below). There are
often several levels at which this information is derived, from formal annual surveys, to more
informal and regular ‘watercooler’ feedback discussions.
Regular meetings – natural feedback often comes from conversations. Regular one-to-one
meetings are a good source of feedback, depending on the relationship between parties.
Meetings can provide more granular detail than surveys in a natural way
Unstructured meetings – often the best way to get real honest information – coffee discussions,
corridor or elevator chats, bar room or ‘journey chats’ (e.g. when 2 colleagues travel together) –
all of these unstructured formats are used for much of the real conversations that happen in
organisations.
Reviewing sickness and attrition – an indicator of poor morale can be high levels of sickness or
staff movement our of a team. Monitoring these levels and identifying any changes is a useful
technique to monitor for any issues.
Staff driven metrics – some organisations let their teams submit their own ‘morale indicators’
on a regular basis. This involves team members discussing and agreeing on a regular ‘score’ that
reflects their overall morale. This can be useful to normalise opinions, although this can be
challenging in teams with strong or influential individuals.
Once we measure various aspects of employee satisfaction we need to identify actions to

improve commitment and trust.
Continual improvement relies on reporting data and outputs from various sources to identify
whether an objective has been achieved or will or will not be achieved. Organizations similarly
use measuring and reporting to drive improvement activities and then track progress against the
stated objectives. Reliable metrics should support good business decisions. Many business
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decisions are often made with insufficient or irrelevant data. Metrics should clarify facts and
experience to drive positive change.
It is important to set appropriate objectives and related metrics, as metrics drive behaviour.
Incorrectly calibrated metrics can lead to inappropriate behaviour to meet targets. The targets
may also be inappropriate for the overall business or customer experience.
It is also essential to develop good metrics that relate to the overall business. It is important to
be clear about the difference between outputs and outcomes. Organizations often integrate
multiple factors into their performance management systems. For example, a results-based
approach may be more applicable to regional retail managers, who focus on setting and achieving
quarterly sales goals, than for baristas, who focus on making drinks and engaging with customers.
Setting and measuring individual performance goals
1. Establish goals in a face-to-face meeting. Create a set of goals for each organization,
function, team, and individual employee.
2. Ensure that the goals are measurable and documented. This will make it easier for the
individual to track their progress.
3. Express the goals in specific terms.
4. Adapt the goals to the individual.
5. Adjust any goals that prove to be unrealistic.
Measuring Team Performance
1. Ensure that the team's goals are aligned with the organization's goals.
2. Begin with the team's customers and the work process that the team follows.
3. Measure both team and individual performance.
4. Qualitative and quantitative measures are needed.
5. Measures must continue to change and evolve to ensure that there are changes in
behaviour to drive continual improvement.
A good performance measure provides management with the ability to make changes and to
discover whether those changes improve the outcome for the customer.
g) The value of positive communications
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In a world where routine, repetitive IT work is rapidly moving to automation; interaction and
communication still relies on people. Communication is happening all the time, and is needed
with customers, suppliers, colleagues, staff. Human interaction and communication is where real
people still stand apart, ahead of the machines.
The ability to communicate effectively is a key business skill and is fundamental to success within
service management. Good human communication is about being efficient, responsive,
professional, and effective. Effective human communication is enhanced by establishing positive
relationships that avoid unnecessary issues and stress. This can form the basis for the successful
delivery of services. In many cases this requires a recognition of the intellectual and emotional
needs of the people engaging in the communication. Service management, sales, and customer
support roles depend upon building positive relationships, which include trust, empathy,
proximity, and shared goals.
All communication creates opinions of the value of the team, and the service provider. It is
therefore important to consider how to manage and coordinate communication. Examples
where communication are required:
• Small team to communicate about projects

• Service desk agents to communicate about incidents
Communication principles
Individuals at work need to communicate regularly and effectively with others, which requires a
rounded set of communication skills. Some people are more natural communicators than others.
Regardless, every stakeholder needs to achieve a basic level of competence and effectiveness in
communicating.
Communication requires an acknowledgement of the perspective of others. Good

communication requires people to be flexible enough to use appropriate content and tone to
achieve the desired objective.
The fundamental principles required for good communication can be summarized as follows:
Communication is a two-way process; successful communication is an exchange of information

and ideas between two or more parties.
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• We are all communicating, all the time, People convey messages about their mood,
attitude and emotional state using language, tone of voice, body language, dress, and
manners.
• Timing and frequency matter, successful communication needs to consider of the best
time to make contact.
• There is no single method of communication that works for everyone. It is important to
recognize and utilize different preferences and methods.
• The message is in the medium. Choose a method of communication that is appropriate
for the importance of the message that is being communicated. A minor point may be
communicated via messaging or email. Big issues or questions require direct discussion
and should not be carried out via email.
Understanding, recognizing and implementing these principles is essential when building positive
relationships with colleagues, customers, and stakeholders. Good communications help to get
the job done, ensuring a pleasant and rewarding exchange for all concerned.
The medium is the message" - Marshall McLuhan
This statement signifies that the characteristics of the medium affects the society in which it plays
a role not only by the content delivered over the medium, but also by the characteristics of the
medium itself. Example:
• Termination notice sent by whatsapp

• Delay in service of major change intimated by tweet
• Promotion information sent by email.
• Increase in salary by personal call
Getting the correct communication across over the right medium is thus very important.
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1.2 Using a ‘shift left’ approach
Shift Left is a term that arose out of software testing circles.
“Shift Left is a practice intended to find and prevent defects early in the software delivery
process. The premise is to improve quality by moving tasks to the left as early in the lifecycle
as possible.”
It is relevant in areas of IT and service management. Shift Left involves moving work closer to its
source. The value stream design principle is that highly-interdependent tasks should be
combined rather than performed as a sequence of specialized tasks. Shift Left is an integrated
approach to improving the flow, efficiency, and effectiveness of work. It is used to move the
delivery of work to the most optimum team or person based on improving lead times, resolution
times, customer satisfaction, and efficiency. In development environments, this means moving
bug-fixing activities to the frontline of build and test teams earlier in the lifecycle. In support
environments, this means moving repair or problem-solving activities from the higher-level
technical teams to generalist frontline teams.
Testing software closer to the requirements gathering step means reducing the number of
defects that are found in the production step and, consequently, lowering the cost of resolving
those defects by a significant factor. Research has shown that defects identified in the production
step are far more expensive to fix than those that are identified in the design phase.
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Shift Left is applicable in numerous management practices, including the release management,
deployment management, service validation and testing, service request management, and
service desk practices.
Shift Left is not limited to the service provider’s tasks. It can also be applied to shift tasks to the
service consumer if the service consumer is willing and able to acquire the necessary
competencies and take responsibility for performing the tasks.
In software testing, where the term ‘Shift Left’ was first used, testing is not organized as a
separate task that is performed after the software code has been developed. Rather, testing is
performed as an integral part of each step of software development, starting with testing the
requirements and design. There is a shift from tester to testing.
Similarly, information security can also be shifted left by embedding information security tasks
into the daily work of development and operations. This contrasts with the traditional approach
of giving these responsibilities to a specialized Information Security Officer who controls whether
products and services conform to requirements. This is often referred to as DevSecOps.
The same principles can be applied within other domains. For example:
• The division of tasks across first-line, second-line, and third-line support can be
reorganized so that first-line service agents are capable of managing more challenging
calls.
• Change approval judgements can be taken by knowledgeable developers, rather than a
separate change advisory board.
The key elements involve reviewing feedback and measurement to assess the current flow of
work and adjusting the ways that work is organized and delivered by moving testing closer to
coding, automating where possible, and moving support activities closer to the customer.
In an organization that is suffering from poor customer feedback and frequent project
interruptions and which has demand for reduced service delivery resolution times, Shift Left can
address those areas of need.
When done well, a Shift Left approach should lead to the following improvements:
• Faster resolution times, leading to increased productivity for the consumer and,
therefore, increased customer satisfaction
• A reduced number of interruptions and, therefore, an increase completed projects.
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• A reduction in cost per incident due to the availability of a self-service that provides for
high-volume requests and can offer relevant and accurate resolutions to common issues
• An increase in the variety of tasks that all team members can perform, leading to
improved employee satisfaction and retention
1.3 Planning and managing resources in the service value system
a) Team collaboration and integration
From a business perspective, collaboration is a practice where individuals work together to

achieve a common, shared goal/objective. Collaboration is essential across teams to improve
business outcomes and customer experience.
Good collaboration involves the following:
• Transparency and visibility of work

• Flexible small teams
• Workflow mapping
• Constant use of feedback
• Use of methods for focusing and managing content and communication.
Many existing social media have features that are being adopted for collaboration and data
collection. Dynamic graphic workflow tools also support improved efficiency and collaboration in
IT and service management toolsets
b) Workforce planning
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“In today’s talent-based economy, the workforce itself is arguably the most important
tangible asset of most organizations. Despite its importance, this asset is often not carefully
planned, measured or optimized,”
-The Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM).
A good workforce planning strategy should identify the roles and associated knowledge, as well
as the skills, abilities, knowledge, and attitudes needed to keep the organization running day
today. It should also address the emerging technologies, leadership, and organizational change
capabilities required to position the organization for continue future success and growth
“The purpose of the workforce and talent management practice is to enable organization,
leaders, and managers to focus on creating an effective and actionable people strategy so
that the organization can achieve its mission, goals, and strategic objectives.”
A good workforce planning strategy should identify: the roles and their related knowledge, skills,
abilities, knowledge, and attitudes that are required to keep an organization functioning. It
should also address the emerging technologies, leadership, and organizational changes required
to continue the organization’s future growth and success.
The focus is on creating an effective and actionable people strategy so that the organization can
achieve its mission, goals, and strategic objectives. This can be summed up as:
• To keep the organization running

• To exploit emerging technologies
• To provide leadership and organizational change capabilities
• To position the organization for future success and growth
Workforce Planning involves
• Strategies for recruiting, retaining, developing, and managing employees

• Understanding how human resources will be used to meet business goals
• Identification of staff as well as skills and competence
Simplistically, workforce planning and talent management is a set of specific workforce strategies
for recruiting, retaining, developing, and managing employees. Workforce planning is
understanding how human resources of an organization will be used to meet your organizations
business’ goals. This can include determining how much resource (person hours) are needed for
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a project/program, identifying the skills these resources need today and tomorrow, and how the
staff’s individual skills will be utilized to ensure that the organization meets it goals and continues
to improve performance.
Workforce and talent management when viewed from the six value chain activities:
• Plan: Understand current and future skills requirements, and staff turnover
• Improve: Continually adapt to meet evolving business needs
• Engage: Understand & forecast changing demand for services and how this will impact
workforce
• Design and transition: Understand competences needed for Agile, DevOps, etc. define
training plans
• Obtain/build: Training, mentoring, succession planning, recruiting or sourcing skills
• Deliver and support: Measure how knowledge, abilities and attitude impact practices
Competence is the set of demonstrable characteristics and skills that enable improvement and
efficiency of a job. People’s competence can be T-shaped, Pi-shaped, Comb-shaped
Broad general
knowledge
m
Specialis
T-shaped individuals are experts in
one area, with knowledge of other
areas. E.g., A developer or tester who
also has knowledge of accounting, or
other business applications
Broad general knowledge

A pi-shaped person is one who is
m
Specialis
m
Specialis
strong is two (or more) areas, plus the

knowledge of other areas. E.g.,
someone who can both design and
develop is desirable for many agile
organizations, as well as someone
who has good testing skills.
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Broad general knowledge

A Comb-shaped individual is strong in
Specialism
Specialism
Specialism
Specialism
more than two areas and
knowledgeable of other areas. For
example, someone who can both
gather requirements, design, and
develop and has a good knowledge of
the adjacent areas.
Although a clear focus on one competence creates deeper understanding, it can be dangerous to
have just one area of profound expertise since the value of any single domain within this self-
renewing industry can erode rapidly.
According to Fredrick Herzburg (HBR How Do You Motivate Employees January 2003) the top
four motivational factors for people at work are:
• Achievement
• Responsibility
• Interesting work
• Recognition
Understanding this can allow organizations leverage this to increase employee

satisfaction/engagement, benefiting the customer, employee, and the organization.
The true potential of an organization can only be realized when the productivity of individuals
and teams are aligned, and their activities integrated to achieve the goals of the organization.
Employee needs and expectations continue to change, so organizations need to conduct

employee satisfaction measures that gather regular feedback, to understand how well they are
meeting employee needs and expectations.
There are three aspects to this:

• Understanding
• Measurement
• Improvement
It has been said “Without measurement, we don’t know if there is improvement; we don’t know
what is meaningful” So why do measure?
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• To identify current and planned future state

• To measure achievement of improvements, changes, or plans
• To measure progress towards goals or objectives
• To support business decisions
• To drive behaviours
• To understand how well services are meeting customer needs/expectations
• To identify opportunities for improvement
c) Results based measuring and reporting
Performance can be considered to be the accomplishment of a given task measured against

preset known standards of accuracy. Performance measurement can be based on behavior or
results.
Behaviours should be measured when

• There is no clear relationship between behaviours and results
• If outcomes are too far in the future
• If results are not in control of those we are measuring
Results should be measured when
• There is a clear link from behaviours to results

• Easiest way to translate strategic objectives into measured actions
• Good when people have skills and abilities needed to complete their work and can correct
their own behaviours
• Motivates people to improve, allows autonomy on how to deliver the results
How to set and measure performance goals
1. Establish goals in a face-to-face meeting. Work out a set of goals for each organization,
function, team, or individual employee.
2. Be sure the goals are measurable and documented. This makes it easy for people to tell
how they're doing.
3. State the goals in specific terms.
4. Suit goals to the individual.
5. Adjust goals that turn out to be unrealistic.
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Measuring Team Performance
1. Ensure that the team's goals are aligned/linked to the organization's goals or goals for the
service.
2. Begin with the team's customers and the work process the team follows to satisfy their
needs.
3. Measure both team and individual performance.
4. Qualitative and quantitative measures are needed.
5. Measures must continue to change and evolve to ensure that there are changes in
behaviours that drive continual improvement.
d) The culture of continual improvement
The need for a continual improvement ‘culture’
There is no doubt that continual improvement is a good thing – as this works towards embedding
good practice, cost reduction, improving operational efficiency, improving customer experience,
developing employee experience speeding up delivery, removing waste and repetitive tasks,
reducing risk etc.
The challenge with Continual Improvement is that this does not happen by itself, or simply
because there is a process or workflow defined for it – or because there is a ‘CSI register’ in place.
Organisations can force the use of these processes – including in some cases the need for staff
to make a target number of suggestions every month.
However, this still does not often provide valuable or useable content – the real benefits of
continual improvement come when the organisation as a whole has a culture that supports,
promotes and empowers all parties to just do this naturally, as part of their approach to daily
work.
Continual improvement should not be thought of as a practice or process, as a workflow or

just as some key artefacts or tools – continual improvement should be embedded in all of
these things, as the ‘way we do things here’ – as the culture of the organisation.
The elements of a continual improvement culture
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Some organisations have an excellent positive culture – it is tangible when entering their offices
and meeting their people. In many cases this has evolved over time due to the influence of some
key people and their approach – sometimes this is understood and often not. In many cases the
culture changes when key people change.
Great organisations are able to recognise and embed the elements that drive this culture,
regardless of the influence of individuals. The key elements of a continual improvement culture
are:
• Transparency – as much as possible to create a culture that is open, sharing and based
on trust.
• Management by example – this needs to be shown by all and leaders in particular, where
words and promises are followed up and acted upon.
• Building trust – establishing a ‘comfort zone’ where people feel enabled and supported
in trying out new ideas, making suggestions, experimenting. The comfort zone should
certainly contrast with any toxic past culture where people where perhaps criticised or
ostracised for having apparently ‘dumb’ ideas.
Active encouragement of positive behaviours in
• Recruitment – ensuring that the right sort of people with suitable skills are hired
• Onboarding – brand values and expectations should be clearly and practically applied
from the start of employment
• Meeting culture – all participants should understand good meeting behaviours –
timeliness, listening, focus on agenda, professionalism, follow up
• Language and taxonomy – taxonomy can be used to drive and enforce poitive behaviours
– removing bias, clarifying exact definitions, encouraging clarity and precision
• Continual improvement expectations –clearly defined as not just ‘permitted’, but wholly
expected of all people involved
• Success – this needs to be constantly marketed/celebrated across all teams
It is also important to provide clarity on continual improvement artefacts and initiatives – there
should be no doubt that this is a way of working that is expected. There is a need to clarify a clear
set of expectations about how this works:
• How to raise an improvement idea

• What happens with these ideas – all are reviewed and actioned one way or another
• What the decision timescales are – and how the outcome will be communicated
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• What other sources of input are- e.g. customer, employee feedback, business
management, users, service management teams
It is also important to provide clarity on continual improvement artefacts and initiatives – there
should be no doubt that this is a way of working that is expected. There is a need to clarify a clear
set of expectations about how this works:
• How to raise an improvement idea

• What happens with these ideas – all are reviewed and actioned one way or another
• What the decision timescales are – and how the outcome will be communicated
• What other sources of input are- e.g. customer, employee feedback, business
management, users, service management teams
1.4 Value of IT across the service value system:
a) Integrated service management toolsets
IT service management (ITSM) tools help regulate how IT services are delivered within a
company. These are usually based on budgets, people, processes, and outcomes. These have
been available for decades.
The features are:
• Automate records and workflow management

• Act as engagement and communication tools
• Support a holistic information model for service management.
The majority of these toolsets are designed to automate service management practices
recommended by ITIL, and they are constantly evolving to adopt new technologies. The most
used functionality of these toolsets
• Systems of record and systems of engagement

• Used to raise, classify, prioritize, escalate and resolve issues, requests and changes for
items and areas of business and technology infrastructure (including people, IT,
departments, services, functional areas).
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• Real-time management of expectations for delivery and fulfilment, approval, escalation
and consumption
• Other administrative functions around inventory, finance and lifecycle management.
The value of these toolsets is in the real time dynamic ability to manage volumes of work which
range from small and simple to complex and large, and to provide reporting and business
analytics on performance, trends, improvements, costs and risks. In addition, the toolsets offer
accountability and audit trails on the delivery of work and management of ‘service’ assets and
resources.
Organizations of various size and reputation use these toolsets in some form or another to
optimize routine record keeping, and demonstrate some levels of accountability, consistency and
control. However, most organizations have only made use of the basic functions in the toolsets
(incident management, SLM, inventory management) and ignored the opportunities for multi-
functional integration across processes. As such the opportunity of end-to-end value stream
integration that the toolsets provide has rarely been met. However, new challenges and
opportunities arise, there is a greater requirement to make use of this functionality and
integration.
Service management toolset expectations
Service management toolsets are expected to provide:
• Effective automation of workflows including:

o combining standardized pre-defined models and flexibility to allow for
customization;
o seamless integration of workflows between different practices, value chain activities
and organizations to enable end-to-end value stream management
o end-to-end automation of product and service lifecycles, covering all stages.
o Effective inventory, monitoring and event management, including intelligent
discovery, change and event detection, capacity monitoring, consumption and
transactions monitoring for technology solutions used both inhouse and by third
parties
• Effective integration with:
o other organizations’ toolsets
o other information systems used in the organization
o other information systems used for service management
o social networks and communication channels used by the organization and its
service consumers, suppliers and partners
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• A high level of service warranty, including
o information security
o availability
o performance
o capacity
o compliance
o continuity
o accessibility
• Conformance to evolving architectural and technical requirements and standards
• Advanced analytics and reporting.
b) Integration and data sharing
Service design frequently relies upon integration between multiple systems. When integrations
are part of the design of a service, it is important to understand the different levels at which the
integration may be modelled, including:
• application integration: applications are made to interact with each other.

• enterprise integration: integrated applications are aligned to provide value.
• business integration: existing business services are aligned.
A number of integration methodologies have evolved over time. Selection of an integration

methodology requires the consideration of multiple factors such as reliability, fault tolerance,
cost, swap-ability, complexity, expected evolution, security, and observability. The design of good
integration relies on a clear understanding of the stakeholders affected by the integration; the
integration should be designed in a way which supports their work methods and needs.
The nature of integration varies in the following manner:
• Some situations simply require a one-time hand-off from one system to another, for
example, a one-time call to a control system to change a parameter.
• Some require an ongoing, two-way process of alignment between two systems, for
example, where a support agent might collaborate with an external supplier’s
representative when each uses a separate ticketing system.
When data is passed from one system to another, it is vital to ensure that compliance is
maintained with regulatory obligations, such as privacy, security, and confidentiality.
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Integration topologies
Integration design requires an understanding and consideration of the different topographical

approaches to integrating multiple systems. There are two generally accepted topologies:
Point-to-point integration: It involves directly linking pairs of systems. This may be suitable for
simple services with a small number of integrated systems. However, there are several
drawbacks to this approach:
• The number of connections grows quickly in proportion to the number of integrated

systems, requiring n(n-1) integrations to be implemented. Note that a bi-directional
integration effectively counts as two separate integrations.
• The number of different integration protocols and methods may be high, which increases
the complexity.
Publish-subscribe: Itis an alternative topology in which messages are published by systems to an
event broker, which forwards the message to the systems which have been designated as its
recipients. The features are:
• There is better scalability, and the looser coupling reduces the complexity of
implementation, (the publishing system does not even need to be aware of the
subscriber).
• Reliability may be a challenge, particularly when the publisher is not aware that a
subscriber has not received a message.
• The broker architecture may be in the form of a bus, in which the transformation and
routing is done by adapters local to each integrated system, (or hub and spoke), where it
is centralized.
• More scalable.
Integration approaches
Where a service implementation is dependent on multiple integrations, it is important to

consider the delivery approach for the integrations.
‘Big Bang’ approach: A ‘Big Bang’ approach involves the delivery of every integration at once.
Integration projects delivered using this approach can become excessively large and complex,
which can lead to issues with, for example, troubleshooting. As a result, the approach is suited
to simple service implementations, with fewer integrated systems, and simpler, lower-risk
integration.
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Incremental delivery: Incremental delivery is an agile approach for the integration of multiple
components, in which new integrations are introduced separately in a predefined order. It
reduces the scale of each individual delivery into production, which enables troubleshooting and
resolution of post-deployment issues. This approach can be used in most circumstances.
However, because the overall service remains incomplete until each integration is in place,
service testing may require extensive simulation to account for undelivered elements.
Direct integration with the (value) stream: This approach allows individual integrations to be
deployed as soon as they are ready, in no pre-determined order. This provides greater agility and
enables rapid initial progress, as with incremental delivery. This approach may necessitate
significant simulation to facilitate adequate testing. Global testing of the entire service, and even
the subsets of functional chains within it, can only be done late in the service implementation.
c) Reporting and advanced analytics
Advanced analytics is the autonomous or semi-autonomous examination of data or content using

high level techniques and tools that go beyond traditional business intelligence (BI) to discover
new or deep insights, make predictions, or generate recommendations.
Some of the advanced analytic techniques are:
• Data/text mining
• Pattern matching
• Forecasting
• Visualization
• Semantic analysis
• Sentiment analysis
• Network and cluster analysis
• Multivariate statistics
• Simulation
• Complex event processing
• Neural networks
• Graph analysis
• Machine learning.
Data science, predictive analytics, and big data are growing areas of interest among researchers
and businesses. This is because within many organizations, there is a vast amount of raw data
but very little useful information. Data on its own is useless; information can provide answers to
questions such as what, how, where, who, and why?
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Information is data that has been transformed into meaningful insight, statistics, reports,
forecasts, and recommendations. In order to transform raw data into valuable information, it is
important to follow a process. This process is known as data analytics, also known as BI
Data: Information that has been translated into a form that is efficient for movement or
processing
Data analytics is the method of examining data sets, often using specialized software, to draw
conclusions about the information they contain. Data analytics technology and techniques are
widely used in industry. There is a typical path that organizations follow to get the most from
their data:
• Data engineering: where data is processed using programming languages such as Python,
R, Java, SQL, Hadoop, and is made ready for analysis.
• Data science: where data is analysed and insight is gained using tools such as R, Azure ML,
Power BI, and so on.
Big Data
“Big Data” is a concept central to the Data Revolution. While it has multiple and varied
definitions; four characteristics stand out:
• Volume – The size of data being generated, used and processed

• Velocity – The Speed at which Data is accumulating
• Variety – This refers to the sources of origin text, graphics, video,
• Veracity – This refers to the uncertainty of the data, due to bias or abnormality of data
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Big Data: A revolution that will transform how we live, work and think
“Big data” has no official definition. It refers to huge volumes of data that are created and
captured and cannot be processed by a single computer, but rather requires the resources of the
cloud to store, manage, and parse. This size of data is on the order of a petabyte or one million
gigabytes. Big data changes the nature of business, markets, and society.
In the twentieth century, value shifted from physical infrastructure like land and factories to
intangibles such as brands and intellectual property. That now is expanding to data, which is
becoming a significant corporate asset, a vital economic input, and the foundation of new
business models.
“Big Data” is the engine of Digital growth. A concept central to the Data Revolution, it is a term
with multiple and varied definitions. Big Data can be defined by the so-called “Four Vs”: volume
(massive and passively generated); variety (originating from both individuals and institutions at
multiple points in the data value chain); velocity (generally operating in real time); and veracity
(referring to the uncertainty due to bias, noise or abnormality in data).
Big data is largely invisible to most people, even as it increasingly informs and shapes decisions
of business, government, and individuals. Big data may exist only as digital bits, but it comes from
the material world and serves the material world. Big data is enabling quantification and analysis
of human life, from the macro down to the micro level— that is, from the global scale down to
the individual. It will present new opportunities for governments, businesses, citizens, and
organizations.
In the space
of just 40
years, the
measure of
data has
gone up from
KiloBytes to
Yottabytes
It goes without saying that a unique technology-fuelled global transformation is underway. The
worldwide increase in digital connectivity, the global scale of highly personalized
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communications services, and advances in data analytics have coalesced to create a powerful
platform for change. In this networked world, people, objects and connections are producing
data at unprecedented rates, both actively and passively.
This explosion of data is relatively new. As recently as the year 2000, only one-quarter of all the
world’s stored information was digital. The rest was preserved on paper, film, and other analog
media. But because the amount of digital data expands so quickly -- doubling around every three
years -- that situation was swiftly inverted. Today, less than two percent of all stored information
is non-digital.
““Big data” is not just the data itself but rather an ecosystem from sensors to storage to
computational analytics to human use of the information and analyses. Big data has been
enabled by the exponential increase in cloud storage and a three-million-fold decrease in storage
costs since 1980, while the cost of computational power and software has also plunged
dramatically over the past thirty years. Today, big data is managed by literally millions of servers
in massive “server farms” operated by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other high-tech
companies, with software algorithms that, for example, enable instant Google searches, Bing
predictive airfare analytics, and Amazon personal book suggestions based on analysis of past
purchases.” Banning Garrett Big Data Is Changing Your World... More than You Know.
The real revolution is not in the machines that calculate data but in data itself and how we use
it. The amount of stored information grows four times faster than the world economy, while the
processing power of computers grows nine times faster.
According to “Data Never Sleeps 6.0” report from Domo, every MINUTE the following happens:
• 15,000 Songs are downloaded from ITUNES

• 4,333,560 Youtube videos are viewed
• Netflix streams 97,222 hours of content
• 400 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube
• 694,444 mails are sent by Mailchimp
• 1,389 Uber rides are ordered
• 49,380 Videos are uploaded to Instagram
• 25,000 GIFS are sent on Facebook Messenger
• 473,400 tweets are sent on Twitter
• 4.2 Million videos are viewed on Snapchat
The cost of running their own big data servers encouraged many system administrators to seek
more scalable, cost-effective solutions. The cloud has been utilized for the storage and processing
of big data.
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The more complex the data, the bigger the challenge of finding value within it. Understanding
and assessing the complexity of data is important when deciding whether a solution is
appropriate, and in mapping out the best approach. The following criteria can be used to analyze
whether an organization is ready for big data:
1. Data size: gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes or exabytes. Volume is not the only
consideration, as data should also be organized into thousands or millions of rows,
columns, and other dimensions.
2. Data structure: data relating to the same subject but from different sources may be
provided in different structures.
3. Data type: structured data, like the entries in a customer order database, may vary by
alphabetical, numerical, or other data type. Unstructured data can exist in many forms,
including freeform text, conversations on social media, graphics, video, and audio
recordings.
4. Query language: database systems use query languages for requesting data from the
database.
5. Data sources: the greater the number of data sources, the higher the probability of
differences in internal data structures and formats. Occasionally, data may be submitted
with no specific format. Data from different sources must be harmonized to in order to
be accurately compared.
6. Data growth rate: the data may increase in volume and variety over time.
There are four steps when generating useful dashboards and reports:
1. Connection to the various data sources. Data may be stored in different databases, in a
data centre, in the cloud, and so on. A connection must be made to the platform used to
store the data.
2. Data extraction, transformation and loading (ETL). The goal is to create one storage
space complete with the compatible and valid version of the data from each data source.
3. Querying the centralized data. User queries must be performed rapidly and efficiently.
4. Data visualization. The results of the queries run on the extracted, transformed, and
loaded data from the different data sources is displayed in a format that users can
consume, per their needs and preferences.
d) Collaboration and workflow
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Collaboration is the process whereby a person or persons works with another to produce
something. From a business perspective, collaboration is a practice where individuals work
together to achieve a common, shared goal/objective.
The ever-increasing adoption of an agile approach to managing work, particularly within software
development, has triggered a related uptake in the use of tools and methods that support it,
including:
• Making work visible: the use of physical boards and maps, colour, and graphics to
visualise the work on hand, to display how the team plans to handle it, and to plot and
record its journey through the workstream. Work or issues that are hidden from view may
be delayed or left unresolved because no one is aware of them or they fall outside allotted
areas of responsibility, or because few individuals possess the knowledge or the
availability to fix them.
• Working in topic-based forums: Although email still predominates in the work place for
the management of work, its characteristics of personal folders, duplicated messages,
and lost attachments hidden within vast, nested email chains mean time is frequently
wasted in the search for important information. Good collaboration tools utilize a forum
approach, where individuals and teams can take part in direct discussion. They facilitate
topic-based areas, mini projects and campaigns, and so on, which are available only to
individuals involved in the discussion; this helps to improve efficiency and avoids time
wasted on searching for documents.
• Mapping workflows: Transparency can lead to greater communication and collaboration
across teams, negating a common challenge within big organizations. Issues and
problems do not follow the typical reporting lines of organizations, so there is a constant
need to improve collaboration by checking for gaps, omissions, or potential blockages
that can go unnoticed between or across teams.
• Working in small teams and sprints: This is a key element in agile and DevOps, where
small integrated teams work on discrete packages of work as end-to-end value streams.
Tools and cross-team methods should dynamically reflect the nature of these teams,
which are often in operation for a finite period of time as part of a matrix resourcing
model or due to flexible ways of managing issues, such as swarming.
• Using simple feedback mechanisms: Communication should not be overly formal or
complicated. Communication that is simple and easy to comprehend is more often
noticed, read and acted upon. The collection of customer and employee feedback should
be instantaneous and intuitive.
• Collaboration and ‘social media’ features: As more individuals use social media in their
private and working lives, certain social media features are being adopted by work-based
tools. Many individuals are used to social media features such as ‘like’, ‘retweet’, or
‘share’, which provide useful data. Furthermore, emojis can also be used to represent
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feedback responses
Tools and capabilities
Many of the tools used for collaboration are designed to resemble interfaces that the user is
familiar with from social media, including:
• Communications wall: This is a feature of many social media platforms, particularly those
dedicated to communication. A communications wall can be used as a central area for
general communication.
• Topic-based forums and folders: These can relate to specific topics with only one or two
users, to a large team or topic-based area, to projects, operational areas, lifecycle areas,
or special interest groups.
• Event surveys: Support software usually provides the capability to gather instantaneous
customer feedback via a survey. The response to surveys is often low, although this can
be improved with thoughtful survey design utilizing brevity and simplicity.
• Portals: Actionable portals for requesting services or reporting issues are becoming more
prevalent, reducing the inefficient use of email. Good design and user experience is
important for successful adoption.
• Self-help: Knowledge bases that provide solutions directly to the user can be useful for
simple and low risk issues.
• Social media functions: Collaboration tools that provide simple and effective means for
users to respond and provide feedback.
Workflow in ITSM tools
A recent development and improvement in many IT and service management tools is the
capability to build, map, and manage process workflows dynamically within the products.
Workflow automation saves time, money, and effort, allowing your IT support teams to focus on
the day job of helping people.
This is frequently delivered via a locked-down development interface, whereby changes to

workflow elements can be made without the need for scripts or coding, meaning they can be
delivered by less technical frontline individuals.
The interfaces for these administration tools are usually designed in familiar process mapping
formats with swim lanes and action boxes, decision points, parallel streams, and dependences.
Some pointers for creating workflows
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• Use consistent language and naming conventions

• Define your dependencies
• Map out all tasks and put them in order
• Identify task roles and owners
• Review the new workflow
e) Robotic process automation (RPA)
Robotic process automation (or RPA) is a form of business process automation technology based
on metaphorical software robots (bots) or artificial intelligence (AI) workers. RPA is a potential
way for organizations to streamline business operations, lower staffing costs, and reduce errors.
Through the use of software robots, repetitive and mundane tasks can be automated, allowing
resources to be deployed on higher value activities elsewhere.
Robots are typically low cost and easy to implement. They do not require the redevelopment of
existing systems or involve complex integration within existing systems. The potential benefits
are clear, as RPA allows for consistent, reliable, and predictable processes to be implemented in
a cost-efficient way. This consistency can lead to fewer errors in key processes, increases in
revenue, better customer service, which leads to greater customer retention.
Where is RPA used?
The types of processes where RPA can yield the most benefit tend to be high volume, error prone,
and sensitive to faults. Processes that are rules-based and which do not require complex decision-
making are open to automation through RPA.
More sophisticated RPA tools incorporate Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
These tools transcend a rote-based approach for one that can adapt and react to a variety of
inputs.
The design and development of RPA plays a part in how robust it is when dealing with change.
Nonetheless, there are limits. The development of RPA often requires configuration and scripts
to define the required inputs and outputs. Though these scripts are straight-forward to construct,
requiring little in the way of technical expertise, they should be treated as software assets, and
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need to be managed as any other software asset. Testing, configuration management, and
change management apply to RPA, as they do to any other software.
RPA technologies
Generally, there are three types of RPA technology:
1. Process automation: This focuses on automating tasks that depend on structured data,
for example, spreadsheets.
2. Enhanced and intelligent process automation: This works with unstructured data, for
example, email and documents. This type of automation can learn from experience and
applies the knowledge it gathers to other situations.
3. Cognitive platforms: These understand customers’ queries and can execute tasks which
previously required human intervention.
Enterprises are beginning to employ RPA, together with cognitive technologies such as speech
recognition, natural language processing, and machine learning, to automate perceptual-based
and judgment-based tasks that were traditionally assigned to humans. The integration of
cognitive technologies and RPA is extending automation to new areas, which can help the
organization to become more efficient and agile as they adopt digital transformation. RPA
software and hardware automates repetitive, rules-based processes that were usually performed
by humans sitting in front of a computer.
The table below shows the steps in manual, RPA and cognitive robotic processes:
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Benefits of a successful RPA programme. These can be categorized in the following:
• Lower labour cost: After the robots are deployed, the only costs are related to servicing
and maintaining the software.
• Increased throughput: As robots can do manual tasks hundreds of times faster than a
human, including developing, testing, and deployment of software, the time to market
for new products can be reduced, which speeds up return on investment. Robots are also
constantly available throughout the year.
• Increased accuracy: Robots are able to achieve near-perfect accuracy, which increases
excellence throughout the value streams, value chain and service value system. This
provides a more consistent experience with a standard level of output, deeper insights
into business/IT performance and customer experience, and a reduction in the level of
human error.
RPA considerations
The impact of RPA on applications and environment is great. There is a concerted approach in
strategic thinking, governance, control, and judicious application to support an overall strategy
for RPA. RPA implementation should be approached with the same caution as would any
service or tool. It needs proper planning, analysis, design, and governance processes, including
the following considerations:
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Garbage in, garbage out: The use of robots to run key processes is a challenge if there are no
standard processes to follow.
ITIL guiding principles: for example, Optimize and automate, and Keep it simple and practical.
Identify areas which have the most potential for automation and prioritize automation
accordingly.
Develop the right skills in the right people: For example, how to arrange and use RPA efficiently
and effectively.
Determine realistic ROI expectations: Design a sound business case and explain costs, risks, and
benefits to the board of directors.
Enable strong collaboration between the business and IT: Special consideration should be given
to RPA project owners and IT, as neither business area can work independently.
Execute automation: Treat automation as a roadmap with short iterations.
f) Artificial intelligence and machine learning
Artificial intelligence (AI), sometimes called machine intelligence, is intelligence demonstrated

by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by humans.
"Artificial intelligence" is often used to describe machines that mimic "cognitive" functions
that humans associate with the human mind, such as "learning" and "problem solving"
Implementation of AI technology requires significant investment in hardware, software, and

expertise. The emergence of a new generation of cloud based services has made AI much more
mainstream. AI technology is increasingly available from major vendors, consumed as public
cloud services, and all major Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) now offer a range of services to
address many different use cases. These service place leading AI offerings at the end of API calls,
and hence many organizations are now consuming them to underpin the digital services they
deliver to their users.
Some service management tool vendors now provide AI driven features as part of their offering,
with examples such as conversational tools for end-users and support agents, automated
classification or routing, and language tools such as translation and sentiment analysis.
One benefit of these services is that they are typically designed and configured specifically for
service management use cases. This can enable them to deliver more immediate value than a
generalized AI tool, which may require additional work to align to the required use cases. These
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may be underpinned by the vendor’s own AI software, or it may harness the technology of
specialist AI vendors.
However, an on-premise AI implementation may still have significant advantages. AI requires a

significant amount of computing power and processing time to function. This may lead to high
charges from public cloud vendors who bill on this basis. Hence, particularly at scale or over time,
it may be more economical to use dedicated on-site hardware. Indeed, a number of vendors now
provide servers and software dedicated to AI.
Applications and value
AI technology offers a broad set of new tools to the service designer, and it is possible to
anticipate many new innovations in the application of AI in service management. Some examples
of common applications of AI in service design and delivery include:
• Process and decision automation: The use of AI to determine the appropriate process
branch to follow based on analysis of the known facts.
• Natural language processing: Interpretation of unstructured text for purposes such as
translation, summarization, or sentiment analysis.
• Conversational interfaces: To enable customers or service agents to interact with the
service management tooling using normal written or spoken language. A common
example being “chatbots” for automated self-service.
• Predictive analysis: Projection of the future state of a metric or situation, enabling
proactive decision making.
• Discovery: Identification of useful insights from large collections of information, such as
log files, knowledge bases, or previously recorded tickets
The growth of ‘AIOps’
AIOps stands for artificial intelligence for IT Operations. The term AIOps was originally derived
from Algorithmic IT Operations. AIOps platforms was first described by Gartner in 2017. AIOps
refers to the practice of combining big data, analytics, and machine learning in the field of IT
Operations.
Instead of siloed teams monitoring their own parts of the infrastructure, the idea is to collect all
the important monitoring data in one place and use machine learning to identify patterns and
detect abnormalities. This can help IT operation to identify and resolve high severity incidents
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faster, and even help them to detect potential problems before it happens. It can also be used to
automate routine tasks so that IT operation teams can focus on more strategic work.
AIOps aims to bring artificial intelligence to IT operations to address the following:
• Modern trends in the ongoing evolution of infrastructure, such as the growth of software
defined systems.
• Increase in the rate at which infrastructure is reconfigured and reshaped.
• Collecting observational data, such as events, log files, and operating metrics, and
engagement data, such as customer request and service desk tickets
These insights may be used to drive some or all a range of common outputs, such as:
• Issue detection and prediction, helping the service organization to respond more quickly
to incidents.
• Proactive system maintenance and tuning, reducing human effort and potential error.
• Threshold analysis, enabling a more accurate picture of the normal range of operation
of a system.
Some organizations have also started to use AIOps beyond IT operations, to provide business
managers with real time insights of the impact of IT on business, keeping them informed and
enabling them to make decisions based on real time and on relevant data.
Machine learning (ML) is the scientific study of algorithms and statistical models
that computer systems use to perform a specific task using patterns and inference.
It is a subset of artificial intelligence.
ML is based on the principle of systems responding to data, and, as they are continually exposed
to more of it, adapting their actions and outputs accordingly. Where machine learning is used to
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underpin services, this essentially means that it becomes the basis for decision making, in place
of paths which are defined by instructions created by human service designers.
Supervised vs unsupervised learning
“Supervised learning is the machine learning task of learning a function that maps an input to
an output based on example input-output pairs” - Stuart J. Russell, Peter Norvig (2010) in
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
Supervised learning is the most commonly encountered machine learning approach. It is used
where both the starting points (inputs) and expected ending points (outputs) are well defined.
Supervised learning can be represented as a simple equation:
Y = f(X)
In this equation, X represents inputs, and Y outputs. The job of the machine is to learn how to
turn X into Y, effectively building the function defined here by ‘f’.
As part of this learning process, a supervisor needs to determine:
• The learning algorithm to be used.

• The sample data set used to train the machine.
In the context of an IT service this may, for example, be rows of structured data from the
system of record such as an ITSM toolset, each of which covers a ‘known good’ previous
decision of the outputs made by a human, based on a range of inputs.
Supervised learning is well-suited to classification problems (for example, identifying emails

that are spam) and regression problems (for example, analysing when a variable metric is likely
to reach a specific threshold).
“Unsupervised learning is a type of self-organized Hebbian (a neuroscientific theory) learning

that helps find previously unknown patterns in data set without pre-existing labels. It is also
known as self-organization and allows modeling probability densities of given inputs” -
Bousquet, O.; von Luxburg, U.; Raetsch, G., eds. (2004). Advanced Lectures on Machine Learning
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Unsupervised learning requires input data, but it does not use existing output data from previous
decisions, and there is no supervisor. Instead, the machine learns from the input data alone.
Unsupervised learning is well-suited to ‘clustering analysis’ (the identification of inherent

groupings in data) and ‘dynamic baselining’, which is the prediction of future behaviours of a
metric based on its past behaviour. In the context of a digital service unsupervised learning may,
for example, be able to detect previously unknown correlations between causes and effects, such
as a likelihood that failure Y will occur when failure X occurs.
Benefits and limitations of machine learning
Benefits of machine learning
• The ability to derive valuable results from quantities of data which would be difficult for
humans to process.
• Enable improvements in the efficiency or accuracy of decision-making
Limitations of machine learning
• Dependency on data
• The algorithms used
• For supervised systems, the quality of training.
The performance of a machine learning system is entirely dependent on its data, the algorithms
used within it, and, for supervised systems, the quality of training. If the input data contains
inherent bias, this can directly distort results, an issue which has led to some high-profile media
coverage where machine learning systems have exposed and propagated racial bias in source
data, for instance.
Selecting and implementing the correct algorithm is important and requires a good knowledge
both of data science principles, and also a strong understanding of the nature of the data set
itself (including aspects such as its outliers). Training a supervised system requires the supervisor
to have a clear understanding of what results are actually correct.
Another significant challenge faced by machine learning systems is the potential for a lack of
transparency in the processing of data. In contrast to deterministic algorithmic systems, where
the behaviours are defined by humans and can be investigated, the behaviours of a machine
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learning system may be difficult to account for, particularly where there are a lot of input
parameters.
Deep learning
Deep learning is a subset of machine learning based on artificial neural networks. This learning
can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised, and relies on computing systems modelled
on the biological neural networks found in animal brains. These systems learn by considering
examples, gradually tuning the weighting factors driving their processing in each instance.
Deep learning uses multiple layers to progressively extract higher level features from the raw
input. So the first layer of the neural network processes a raw data input like the amount of the
transaction and passes it on to the next layer as output. The second layer processes the previous
layer’s information by including additional information, to get an output for another layer of
processing.
g) Continuous integration and delivery/deployment (CI/CD)
Introduction to CI/CD
Continuous integration (CI) is the practice of merging all developers' working copies to
a shared mainline several times a day. Each check-in or shared copy is then verified by
an automated build, allowing teams to detect problems early.
CI/CD refers to Continuous Integration, and either Continuous Delivery or Continuous

Deployment. These are descriptive terms for a collection of practices primarily associated with
software engineering, which are central to the philosophy of Lean, agile software development.
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Continuous delivery (CD) is a software engineering approach in which teams produce

software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released into a
production environment at any time.
.
The adoption of these practices has grown rapidly, and it is important to understand the defining
characteristics of CI/CD, and the wider context of evolving system development practices when
implementing services which are underpinned by software development.
‘Continuous Delivery’ describes the practice of making frequent, typically small deployments of
code into the production environment. ‘Continuous Deployment’ is sometimes used to describe
the automation of this process.
CI/CD is, effectively, a practical methodology for delivering software in an agile manner,
consistent with the set of principles defined in the Agile Manifesto, which can be summarised as
follows:
• satisfying the customer through early and continuous delivery of value.

• welcoming changing requirements, even if late, and harnessing change for competitive
advantage
• delivering working software frequently, with a preference for shorter timescales
• daily collaboration between developers and the business stakeholders of the services to
which they contribute
• using motivated individuals, supporting them, and trusting them to get the job done
• favouring face-to-face communication
• regarding working software as the primary measure of progress
• promoting sustainable development, so that a consistent pace can be maintained
indefinitely
• enhancing agility though continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
• relying on self-organising teams, on the basis that they will produce the best architecture,
requirements and designs
• reflecting regularly, as a team, on how to become more effective, and adjusting behaviour
appropriately.
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CI/CD should not be confused with DevOps. While the establishment of CI/CD is inherent to its
adoption, DevOps has a much broader context, encompassing team organization and culture in
addition to any specific mechanics for system delivery
Goals and value measurements
CI/CD has a primary goal of enabling smaller, high-frequency deployment of changes to systems.
This is intended to reduce risk (by making each deployment less complex) while simultaneously
increasing the velocity of delivery of value (by enabling useful changes to be delivered more
quickly to consumers). The agile movement views large, complex projects as ineffective due to
the following:
• The complexity of large production deployments increases the risk of introducing new
issues, and makes troubleshooting more difficult.
• Long periods between releases reduce the opportunity to deliver value quickly. This leads
to opportunity costs, and reduces an organization’s ability to adapt its services to new,
emergent conditions.
• Linear development frameworks reduce the opportunity to interact on a regular basis
with consumers, increasing the chances that a solution will be delivered that is sub-
optimal for the consumer’s needs.
• Small changes are easier to comprehend, consume, test, troubleshoot and (where
necessary) roll back.
CI/CD teams often define their success on:
• Ability to deliver code changes to production systems quickly, efficiently, and reliably.
• Identification and removal of bottlenecks which would reduce the speed of delivery.
• Strong focus on automation of aspects of delivery which would otherwise require
significant manual effort.
The CI/CD pipeline
A key component of the implementation of CI/CD is the pipeline. This term defines the set of
tools, integrations, practices and guardrails which allow a continuous and substantially
automated flow of changes, from their initial design and development, through to deployment
into production.
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This flow is typically broken up into three different stages:
• Build automation (the CI phase): This stage encompasses coding practices such as version
control and the merging of multiple developers’ changes into one branch.
• Test automation – In this stage each change is automatically tested and validated as part
of the flow chain from development.
• Deployment automation – This stage involves the automation of the actual process of
moving code from pre-production environments to the production service.
A significant focus for organizations or teams implementing CI/CD is the reduction of pieces of
work requiring manual effort which, if unchanged, would impede the flow of the CI/CD pipeline
without delivering a proportional amount of specific value. This kind of work is sometimes
referred to as ‘toil’. Google’s Site Reliability Engineering handbook defines toil as work which
exhibits some or all of a set of certain characteristics:
• Manual – Work which requires hands-on time from humans.

• Repetitive – Work which is being done not for the first or even second time, but which is
done over and over again
• Automatable – Work which could be achieved by a machine just as well as by a human,
rather than requiring specific human judgement
• Tactical – Work which is interrupt-driven and reactive rather than strategy-driven and
proactive
• Devoid of enduring value – Work which does not make any permanent improvement in
the service, instead leaving it in the same state after the task has finished
• Linearly scaling – Work which scales up in proportion to the service size, traffic volume,
or user count.
When designing and implementing a service which relies on the effective operation of CI/CD
practices, it is important to either eliminate or avoid toil. Failing to do so can limit the scalability
of the service, and unnecessarily increase the cost of delivering it, particularly as the service
grows.
Aligning CI/CD to ITIL
The core aspects of Agile software development, and by extension CI/CD, are closely aligned to
each of the ITIL guiding principles:
• Focus on value: Agile development is intended to deliver early and continuous value to
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the customer.
• Start where you are: Agile is built on the concept of continuous, incremental
development rather than large releases after lengthy development cycles.
• Progress iteratively with feedback : Agile advocates continuous feedback loops.
• Collaborate and promote visibility: Good Agile product delivery requires effective
visualisation of work to all delivery participants, as well as constant interaction with the
consumer of the delivered service.
• Think and work holistically: Agile development focuses on the big picture of the business
and consumer goals of the work.
• Keep it simple and practical: Agile development is founded on lean principles. As such,
non-productive, low value activities are regarded as waste, and are eliminated.
• Optimize and automate: Continuous feedback loops and reduction of toil are
fundamental to good Agile practices.
When working with CI/CD processes and the teams responsible for them, in designing and
implementing services, people and teams should actively seek opportunities to enhance the
success of those elements.
CI/CD doesn’t suit every situation
Agile approaches such as CI/CD are well suited to situations where there is a high uncertainty
about present and future requirements for a service, and where risks associated with errors or
failure are low impact or can be managed quickly. In these cases, the iterative nature of CI/CD
enables the ongoing development of the service to respond to, and drive, an increasing
understanding of the customer’s demands and the best way to deliver value to them.
However, plan-based approaches such as the waterfall method may still be more suitable in some
situations, for instance where there is a high certainty about the requirements of the service, or
where safety criticality demands the use of large batch deployments which are not well suited to
the agile approach.
In practice, particularly in larger and more complex organizations, a service will often be
dependent on multiple elements which are delivered using different approaches.
h) Information models
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As digital transformation progresses, the business operations of organizations continually
become more closely aligned to, and dependent on, their technology systems and services. As
this happens, information can increasingly become a constraint on the effective delivery of
services. Factors which can contribute to this issue:
• the organization may distribute information inconsistently and sporadically across

multiple IT systems and beyond (some, for instance, may exist in physical media, while
other critical data and knowledge may only exist in people’s heads)
• the quality of the information may be overestimated or unclear
• multiple systems, increasingly running on multiple infrastructure types, may be critical to
the operation of the organization’s services, but it may not be clear how these are critical.
• Inconsistent terminology may be used across different parts of the organization.
An information model is used by organizations to combat this type of challenge, developing a

shared understanding of the organization’s information, terminology, systems and structure.
The value of such a model is multi-faceted. It can be a key enablement tool for transforming
processes and practices, for integrating technologies, for gaining an accurate overview of
strengths and weaknesses in the service framework, and for driving informed decisions at
multiple levels of the organizational hierarchy.
Anatomy of an Information Model
An information model in software engineering is a representation of concepts and the

relationships, constraints, rules, and operations to specify data semantics for a chosen
domain of discourse
Typically, it specifies relations between kinds of things, but may also include relations with
individual things. It consists of some key elements
• Definitions of key facts, terminology, activities and practices within the organization.
• Structural representations of key components of the organization’s technology and
business services, and the relationships between them.
The ideal level of detail held within a model will vary not just between organizations, but also
between different areas within an organization.
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Areas of business which are undergoing more rapid change or more significant investment
warrant more detail in an information model than areas which are relatively static.
Information Model Examples
• Common Information Model (managed by DMTF): A set of open standards setting out a
common (and growing) definition of management information across a wide range of IT
infrastructure, including modern cloud and virtualization technologies.
• Frameworx: A set of ‘best practices and standards that when adopted enable a service-
oriented, highly automated and efficient approach to business operations’. Particularly
focused on telecommunications, and managed by TM Forum, it is a widely used
framework in that industry.
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2. Contribution of ITIL Practices in CDS
In this chapter we will see how to:
• document a value stream to understand how work flows across the organization
• understand an archetype value stream to create a new service
• understand an archetype value stream to support a live service.
This chapter will help practitioners understand:
• the role of a value stream in the SVS

• the taxonomy of a value stream
• how to describe the steps in a value stream
• how to apply common mathematical modelling techniques to streamline a value stream
• considerations when designing a value stream.
Practitioners need to understand that understand that value streams are simple, but not
necessarily simplistic, representations of work. There are many different value streams, because
various types of work follow different routes.
They can either represent a design or ideal pattern of activity or reflect the actual, observable
patterns of activity. The same resources, such as individuals, tools, suppliers, or processes, can
appear in different parts of the value stream; for example, a support agent can be part of user
engagement, support investigation, and the deployment of a fix to restore service
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2.1 Using a value stream to design, develop and transition new services
ITIL service value chain. It is an operating model for service providers that covers all the key
activities required to effectively manage products and services.
The ITIL service value chain includes six activities:
• engage
• Plan
• Improve
• obtain/build
• deliver and support
A value chain can:
• Mention one, some, or all value chain activities, depending on the context.
• Repeat value chain activities, depending on the work in progress.
A value stream is a series of steps an organization undertakes to create and deliver products and
services to consumers. A value stream can be visualized as journeys through activities in the
service value chain, for a specific scenario or type of demand. Each value stream may follow its
own journey. A value stream is itself made up of one or more steps. A step is comprised of one
or more actions that accomplish a specific objective.
Through the value stream model, the organization processes units of work, which may change
depending on the context, and the level of granularity.
A value stream is a series of steps an organization undertakes to create and deliver

products and services to consumers
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Through the value stream model, the organization processes units of work, which may change
depending on the context, and the level of granularity. For example, the execution of a value
stream to create a new service triggered by a consumer request:
• At the value stream level, the unit of work can be defined as, the consumer request that
needs to be fulfilled, which might change to, the service portfolio item that is being
created, during the execution of the value stream.
• At the step level, the unit of work can be defined as, the requirements that need to be
assessed, which might change to, the design characteristics defined in the service design
package, during the execution of the value stream.
A value stream can be described using fields such as:
• Name
• Owner
• Description
• Demand
• Trigger
The diagram below shows the relationship between value chain activities, the value stream, the
steps in a value stream, the actions within a step, and the tasks within an action.
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A large enterprise can include several distinct organizations managed with certain level of
autonomy, where it is possible to treat every one of them as a service value system with its own
value chain and value streams. However, it is unlikely that self-sufficient service value systems
will be established at the level of teams.
Each step of the value stream can be described as a process, or as a value stream for a lower-
level organization.
Processes and value streams:
The key differences between value streams and processes have to do with their focuses and
how they are used. Many sets of interrelated activities that transform inputs into outputs
could be considered a process. Value streams are focused around the flow of activity from
demand or opportunity to customer value. So, process taxonomy, and management tools and
techniques are applicable to value streams, however many processes are not value streams.
Each step in a value stream could be reframed as a process, and some may represent value
streams of a lower-level organization.
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Cascade value streams to lower level value streams and/or processes allowing organizations to:
• Focus on value for the higher-level value stream, combining value streams and processes
of participating parties.
• Progress iteratively with feedback from other organizations and teams in the value
stream.
• Collaborate and promote visibility into how work flows across the organizations and
teams.
• Think and work holistically by understanding how the wider organization or ecosystem
works and benefits from work being done by the participating parties.
Value stream considerations
When describing a value stream, the following considerations should be taken into account:
1. A value stream can be documented from either of two perspectives:
• A value stream can be designed to reflect the aspirations of the service provider. After
the value stream has been documented, it can be compared against observed
behaviours. Deviations between the design and the observed results will likely trigger
the continual improvement practice.
• A value stream can reflect actual work patterns. The documentation can assist in
optimizing the value stream to make it more effective, reduce the time taken to
convert demand into value, automate repeatable work, explore how the value stream
reflects the reality of how work is observed.
2. A value stream always starts with demand, and always ends with value being created or
restored for one or more stakeholder. Thus, it is highly desirable to maintain an outside-
in tone or language when documenting the value stream.
3. A value stream can loop around and repeat value chain activities, reflecting the context
and the environment in which work is performed. However, a value stream can be as
flexible as the organization needs it to be. For example, the organization can add in
another stage during the work similar to a waterfall approach, , or as iterative loops
between value chain activities.
4. Value streams are a representation of work, as viewed at a certain level of granularity.

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5. There are several factors to consider when deciding what constitutes a separate step in a
value stream, and what should be included within an existing step. These include the level
of detail that would be represented in the value stream. The inclusion of multiple value
chain activities could also affect the value stream.
Designing a service value stream
It’s important to think holistically when starting to plan out a piece of work to build a new service.
There may be existing structures, team and processes within your organisation which you need
to consider as part of the approach – e.g. a project team or teams, project office, technical teams
and a service desk. These may be using project management methodologies, technical standards
and service management processes as part of their daily work, all of which are useful and valuable
for their needs
The following section describes one of many approaches to design a value stream. Practitioners
are highly encouraged to adapt this approach to the needs of their organization, or to explore
the use of other approaches.
1. Define the use case, or scenario, for the value stream, by describing:
a) The demand (preferably in non-technical terms)
b) The trigger created by the demand
c) The outcomes created by the value stream
d) Value in the context of the value stream (value can be created or restored)
2. Document the steps required to traverse the service value chain from demand to value.
3. Map the steps from no. 2 above to the service value chain
4. If necessary, decompose steps into actions and tasks
5. Identify the practices and associated resources that contribute to the successful
completion of each step, action, or task including:
a) Operational and management teams, or individuals
b) Tools and technology
c) Information and data (records, forms, or other artefacts)
d) Any partners and suppliers that create outputs or outcomes using their own
resources
The 5 steps above should be completed in a collaborative way. At the first stage of
documentation, it is not necessary to get all the details correct, but to establish a broad and
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general understanding (or a “baseline”) of the work needed to respond to demand and generate
value.
Once a baseline has been established, the value stream can be further explored and optimized
by:
• Creating simple simulations to test the flow of work

• Eliminating work that does not create meaningful outputs, outcomes or benefits
• Shifting work left
• Delaying work that can introduce variance in quality, cost, or timeliness
• Introducing feedback loops and escalation mechanisms to improve the quality of the
outputs and benefits produced by the value stream
• Identifying opportunities to automate steps, actions, or tasks to speed up flow of work
• Identifying and managing bottlenecks and constraints (which may even include
redesigning the value stream around the constraint)
• Introduce triggers to review, and if necessary, improve the value stream. Reviews can be
ad-hoc
Describing A Step of the Value Stream
When describing a step in a value stream, the questions that need to be answered include:
• Name of the step – What are we calling the step? Can the step be described in non-
technical language and avoid acronyms and jargon so that anyone reviewing the value
stream can easily understand what it’s meant to accomplish.
• The input trigger(s) - What will cause the step to start, or when will the step start?
• Information needed - What information - whether obtained from an external stakeholder,
a previous step in the value stream, or drawn from other organisational resources - is
required to create the defined outputs or outcomes? When will the information be
available to the step?
• Practice contributions - what tools, technologies, people, and other resources can the
organization’s practices contribute to ensure the successful completion of the step?
• Actions and tasks - what needs to occur in order to act on the incoming trigger and achieve
the required output? What can be executed in parallel and what have pre-requisites?
How long does each action or task take?
• Constraints - what policies (which may be defined by the service provider, or by external
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stakeholders) does the step have to comply with? What resource constraints does the
organisation face?
• Outputs - Why does the step exist - What outputs does the step need to provide? What
value does that create for the service provider, its consumers, or other stakeholders?
• Estimated or Target Lead Time – How long should a unit of work take to complete the
step, including time spent waiting in a queue?
Value Stream Mapping
Value stream mapping is required to build an end-to-end picture of how the service will be used
and experienced – ideally involving all of the stakeholders as mentioned above – and from a
customer and business-outcome perspective.
There are various ways to achieve this, although in essence this requires work to map out a
holistic and complete view of the end-to-end service ‘process’ seen from a customer viewpoint
at the centre. There can be other views related to this which are more technology of process
focused about this should start with a user journey.
Often this is done in a project room or boardroom with large sheets of paper or writing on boards
to show a complete picture – also one that might be difficult to easily represent and update if
done digitally. The physical maps helps to show all areas as well as being highly collaborative with
a group of people – it is also a good transparent way to make the work of the group visible to a
wide group of people who may pass and see it regularly.
A key advantage of the mapping exercise is the ability to see potential points of failure - areas of
high risk, blockage and weakness in the value stream, particularly if these are not a technical
element. For example, there may be a dependency on a specific process or person who is out of
the control of the organisation, or who is not skilled, or a supplier who does not understand the
value stream etc. These areas of risk may not be clearly owner or accounted for in traditional
silo-ed organisations, although they will inevitably become points of failure if not attended to.
The mapping highlights these points of failure and can then initiate action to mitigate these risks.
Without visualisation and a collaborative approach, these risks are not always identified or raised
by individual teams, yet they still need to be owned and mitigated.
Examples of points of failure might be individual’s availability, delayed responses, low-value

administration, bureaucratic approval stages, mounting work queues, misunderstood priorities,
invisible requirements.
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Value stream mapping helps organizations by:
• Visualizing more than just the single-process level, i.e. assembly, welding, etc., in
production. The flow from opportunity to value is visible and clear
• Making the sources of waste in each value stream more visible
• Providing a common language for talking about value streams and processes
• Making decisions needed about the flow apparent, so they can be discussed
• Otherwise, many details and decisions on the work floor just happen by default
• Tying together Lean concepts and techniques, which discourages using just one or two
concepts or techniques in isolation
• Forming the basis of an implementation or improvement plan. By helping organizations
design how the end-to-end flow should operate, value stream maps become a blueprint
for implementation
• Demonstrating the linkage between the information flow and the material flow
Key metrics when analysing a value stream
There are several important metrics which can be defined at the value stream, step, action, and
task level:
1. Cycle Time: This is the amount of time required to complete a discrete unit of work,
converting input(s) into output(s). For example, if it takes 5 minutes to fill in a new
incident form, then we say that the cycle time is 5 minutes
2. Wait Time: This is the amount of time a discrete unit of work waits in a queue before it is
worked on. For example, an incident ticket waits (on average) 4 hours before work on it
begins
3. Queue: The number of discrete units of work waiting to be operated on by the step,
action, or task
4. Lead Time: This is the sum of Cycle Time(s) and Wait Time(s) from start to finish. It
represents the total time required to complete a discrete unit of work, from when it
enters the queue to when the work completes
5. Work in Progress: The number of discrete units of work currently being operated on, but
which are not yet completed
6. Throughput: The rate at which work enters or exits the system (that is, the scope of work
under consideration, which could be the service value system, the value stream, a value
stream step, action, or task)
The term “Process timing” originates from Little’s Law,
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“states that the long-term average number L of customers in a stationary system is equal to
the long-term average effective arrival rate λ multiplied by the average time W that a customer
spends in the system”.
Little’s Law can be simplistically represented as:
Work In Progress = Throughput x Lead Time

or
Work In Progress = Throughput x (Cycle Time + Wait Time)
Liitle’s Law, a theorem by John Little states that the long-term average number L of customers in
a stationary system is equal to the long-term average effective arrival rate λ multiplied by the
average time W that a customer spends in the system
This mathematical representation works for simple systems, and in complicated environments
where more than one activity, step, or task is taking place simultaneously, it might be more
difficult (but not impossible) to apply this model.
High level value stream for a new service

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A value stream for a new service might be represented simplistically, and at a very high-level as:
The same value stream can be represented (more accurately, and with a significantly higher
complexity) at a more granular level as:
Complex representation of a value stream
Regardless of complexity of the environment, Little’s Law leads to the following considerations
when designing a value stream, step, or action:
• It is advisable to minimize the number of times work is "handed off”. Hand-offs create
queues, and queues create waiting time, thereby increasing lead time. Reduction is often
accomplished by increasing the level of automation, or by up-skilling staff to increase the
range of tasks they can work on.
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• Throughput, especially in the context of external events and triggers, is often not in
control of the service provider. However, the use of statistical modelling functions can
help estimate the pattern of activity. For example, a supermarket cannot predict the
exact number of shoppers visiting each hour of the business day, but can use statistical
models to create estimates
• In simple systems, Wait Time can be expressed as a function of Cycle Time. for a new unit
of work is (Cycle Time x units of work already in the system). For example, if it takes 10
minutes to complete a unit of work, one unit is currently being worked on and three units
waiting to be worked on, then:
o The next unit of work to enter the system will spend 10 minutes/ unit x (1 + 3) units =
40 minutes in the queue.
o The Lead Time for the next unit of work would be 40 minutes Wait Time + 10 minutes
Cycle Time = 50 minutes.
• Depending on level of granularity and nature of the work, Cycle Time can be assumed to
be fixed and predictable.
• To create more predictable Cycle Time, it may be necessary to limit the Work In Progress.
MODEL VALUE STREAMS FOR CREATION, DELIVERY AND SUPPORT
We now explore the two common value streams models that can be found in nearly all
organizations:
1. Development of a new service: Organizations often find it necessary to create, modify or

retire services. In this value stream, we will examine common patterns of work required
to create a new service – something that requires significant effort and coordination
across the organization.
2. Restoration of a live service: In modern, complex IT organizations, failure is to be expected
and must be dealt with quickly. In this value stream, we will examine the typical activities
we expect when detecting and resolving failures, and how such activities can be leveraged
to improve the service.
It is important to note that these value streams model need to be adapted to the needs of each
organization depending on context and complexity.
Development of a new service
In this value stream archetype, we examine typical activities that organizations undertake to
create or significantly modify an existing service. This archetype is agnostic to the nature of the
service and can be used to describe a value stream to create services provided to consumers
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within the organization or external to the organization. The typical considerations when
designing this value stream include:
• How will the work be managed – in large increments using sequential stage-gated phases
(waterfall), or in small increments that provide fast feedback and the opportunity to change
specifications at short notice (agile), or a mix of both. It might be necessary to create separate
value streams depending on how work is managed, and to describe different project
management methodologies in each value stream
• Establishing the right level of oversight to maintain focus on business outcomes, and not the
outputs
• Establishing the right level of bureaucracy to ensure effective coordination of activities
between various organizational units, and between the organization and its partners,
suppliers, customers, users, and other key stakeholders
• Joining up all the activities from all the practices required to create a new service, to create
an end-to-end, holistic vision for the work
• Ensuring that the organization has a clear understanding of the customer’s intended goals
and expectations, and to track each of them from start to finish to ensure that the service
supports the required outcomes. The organization should avoid introducing conflicts or
inconsistencies when translating customer needs into service specifications (both functional
and non-functional)
• Understanding the customer’s journey from demand to value, and defining requirements
from the customer’s point of view rather than relying only on internal perspectives or prior
experience of team members
This value stream describes the journey from demand six key steps:
1. Understand and document

service requirements
2
2. Decide whether to invest in 3
the new service 5
1 4 6
3. Design & architect the new
service to meet customer
requirements
4. Build, configure, or buy
service components
AXELOS®, ITIL® and the swirl logo are registered trademarks of AXELOS
5. Deploy service components Limited.
6. Release service to
customers and users
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The value stream needs to consider all activities in the end to end value stream that takes
demand and helps to co-create value. The value stream may represent activity from many
different teams like the project office, integrated product teams, separate SILO’d teams doing
architecture, design, development, infrastructure, testing, release etc.
• The value stream must be designed to enhance the entire customer journey, not just the
individual touchpoints.
• The outside-in approach considers everything from the customer viewpoint; as opposed
to IT-centric inside-out approach based on requirements only
• One needs to Involve all stakeholders in the value chain as early as possible including
customers, not just IT staff
Summary of points for creating a value stream for new services:
• Inputs / triggers: What will cause the value stream to start, or when will it start? How will
the value stream be recognised and classified?
• Stakeholders: Who are the customers, users, suppliers, partners, colleagues involved?
For the design and build and then for the ongoing delivery of the product
• Information: What information is required to create the defined outputs or outcomes?
How will this information be accessed and used?
• Practices: Which relevant (ITIL 4) practices and other work activities are required to be
used and integrated?
• Resources: What tools, technologies, people, and other resources, does the organization
have to execute the value stream? What roles and responsibilities do resources have at
each step of the value stream?
• Activities: What steps are needed from the incoming trigger to achieve the required
output? What steps can be executed in parallel or have pre-requisite steps, activities, or
sub-processes? How long does each step take?
• Constraints: What policies from various sources does the value stream need to comply
with?
• Outputs: Why does this value stream exist? What outputs and outcomes does the process
need to create? What value does that create for the service provider, its consumers, or
other stakeholders?
Demand
The value stream is triggered by demand to create or modify an existing service. Demand might
originate from any of the following:
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• A consumer who could be a sponsor, customer or user
• An external stakeholder which could be a supplier or a regulator
• A business function like sales or marketing
• Members of the organizations governing body
Acknowledging and documenting the request
Any request for new product or service features starts by acknowledging and documenting the
demand. It is a common practice to use business case methods to collect and assess
requirements. It is important to remember that the objective is the collection of enough
information to submit the business case.
Successful completion of this step requires the organization to engage with the requestor, as well
as other stakeholders like marketing and sample users (using surveys and polls) to fill in the
business case template with high-level information about the requirement, benefits (both
quantitative and qualitative), costs, and risks. This information is also supplemented by high-level
estimates from various technical and service management teams, who consider the cost of
development, release, operations and support. Practices that commonly contribute to this step
include:
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• Business Analysis: Provides resources to document the business case, and to perform a
viability assessment
• Configuration Management: Provides information on current live services and service
component to provide context when describing the demand
• Relationship Management: Provides resources to manage the requestor’s expectations
and rapport with the service provider
• Service Level Management: Provides information on current services to provide context
when describing the demand
• Service Portfolio Management: Provides information on current, retired, and future
(planned) services
Assessing the requirements
Once the request has been refined and documented in the business case, it might be necessary
to refine the initial cost, benefit, and risk assessments to allow the organization to plan the work.
This would require more

detailed discussions with
various internal teams, and
possibly ongoing
conversations with customers
and other external
stakeholders. Once
completed, the business case
can be considered by the
management team, and a
“go/no-go” decision
provided.
Practices that commonly contribute to this step include:
• Business Analysis: Provides the skills, tools, and other resources necessary to work with
various specialist teams to gather additional information and assessments, and will
perform a viability analysis against customer requirements documented in the business
case template
• Configuration Management: Provides information on currently operational configuration
items
• Infrastructure and Platform Management: Provides supplementary assessments on how
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infrastructure components of the new service might be engineered and developed, and
its impact to ongoing application management activities, and will contribute to the
business case assessment as necessary
• Problem Management: Provides information on current errors and workarounds that
might have an impact on the new features
• Project Management: Provides administrative and technical resources to complete the
business case assessment. This overview can be used to fill out the Value Stream Step
template provided in the previous.
• Risk Management: Provides information on current enterprise risks that may be impacted
(positively or negatively) by the new features
• Service Design: Provides supplementary assessments on how the new service might be
designed to meet internal standards and policies around utility, warranty, brand, and
other criteria, and will contribute to the business case assessment as necessary
• Service Desk: Provides supplementary assessments on how the new service might impact
current customer and user support channels, and will contribute to the business case
assessment as necessary
• Service Financial Management: Provides tools and policies to calculate the return on
investment (ROI) the new features might provide
• Service Level Management: Provides information on current service levels provided by
the app and underlying infrastructure, and the changes the new functionality might
introduce
• Service Portfolio: Provides the resources necessary to allow the Service Owner to
complete the viability assessment and decide on whether to authorize the investment in
the new service
• Software Development and Management: Provides supplementary assessments on how
software components of the new service might be engineered and developed, and its
impact to ongoing application management activities, and will contribute to the business
case assessment as necessary
Designing the Service
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Once the decision has been made to create or modify the existing service, it will be necessary to
review the existing service if any, and modify the design to accommodate the new features. For
example:
• Integration of the account review system with the payments system

• Increase the business, service, and technology capacity
• Assess additional infrastructure required to maintain current service level targets around
utility and warranty
There is also a need at this stage to translate the requested features and updated service design
into software and infrastructure designs and specifications. Depending on the methods used to
develop software and infrastructure components, this might mean creating an initial backlog of
epics and user stories. Practices that commonly contribute to this step include:
• Architecture Management.
• Availability Management: Provides the skills, tools, and other resources needed to
describe the potential demand for the service, and the technical, service, and business
capacity needed to meet that demand, and to document the same in the Service Design
Package
• Business Analysis.
• Capacity and Performance Management: Provides the skills, tools, and other resources
needed to describe the potential demand for the service, and the technical, service, and
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business capacity needed to satisfy that demand while maintaining expected levels of
performance, and to document the same in the Service Design Package
• Configuration Management: Provides information on currently operational services and
configuration items
• Information Security Management: Provides the skills, tools, and other resources needed
to design the measures needed to ensure that confidentiality, integrity, and availability of
information as well as authentication and non-repudiation of customers and users is in
line with organizational policies, and to document these measures in the Service Design
Package
• Infrastructure and Platform Management.
• Project Management.
• Service Continuity Management: Provides the skills, tools, and other resources needed to
design the measures needed to ensure that the availability and performance of the new
service are maintained at sufficient levels in the case of a disaster, and to document the
same in the Service Design Package
• Service Design: Provides the skills, tools, and other resources necessary to design the
customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) when interacting with the new
service, and document the same in the baseline service design package
• Service Level Management.
• Software Development and Management.
• Supplier Management: Assists in interactions with partners and suppliers, and in selecting
new suppliers to source service components
Creating and validation service components
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Once the design package has been baselined, work to obtain or build service components can
begin. A service component is often a technical component, such as software, servers, storage,
networks, and so on. In many cases, there can also be non-technical service components
(depending on the nature of the service) that also need to be managed to deliver a product or
service, such as new team structures, new roles, critical skills and competencies, knowledge base
articles, training documentation, and vendor contracts.
Thus, it is critical to acknowledge and “configure” both the technical, and non-technical, aspects
of products and services, which can include
• Technical integration between the applications

• Modification of existing back-end and client applications
• Increase the processing capacity and infrastructure
• Update and communicate training documents for customer support agents, and provide
simple scripts to help customers
• Update and communicate release notes that can be used to promote the new service
• Begin marketing the upcoming changes to products and services, without committing to
specific features
• Update the service design package to reflect agreed-upon changes made while obtaining
or building service components
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• Configuration management.
• Infrastructure and Platform Management.
• Release Management: Provides the skills, tools, and other resources to create and
communicate the release plan, and to update maintain the plan as development and
deployment activities progress
• Risk Management.
• Service Portfolio Management.
• Service Validation and Testing: Provides the technical skills, tools, and other resources
needed to document test cases, carry out automated and manual testing, and provide
feedback and reports from testing activities
• Software Development and Management.
• Supplier Management.
Preparing to Deliver
Once service components have been

built, work to deploy and release
service and service components into
the live products and services can
begin.
Due to the mixed nature of service components, the organization may need to utilize different
approaches for example:
• Software components leverage the CI/CD toolchain and are immediately deployed into
production with a feature flag that prevents users from accidentally accessing new or
changed features.
• Infrastructure components (server, storage, or network configurations) are developed
and deployed just prior to launch.
• Internal documentation is developed over the course of the Obtain/ Build step and are
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distributed just prior to launch
• Marketing documentation can be developed using stable software features, and in
conjunction with release plans
At this stage, two more important pieces of work can also be considered:
• Planning the release of the service: Once the majority of the development and
configuration work is completed, it is possible to finalize the release plans.
• Creating customer collateral (flyers, emails, posters, advertisements, etc.) to build
awareness of the new features, and to promote their benefits
• Change Enablement: Provides the skills, tools, and other resources needed to submit a
Requests for Change (RFCs), assess and approve RFCs, and to schedule changes to various
service components
• Configuration management.
• Deployment Management.
• Incident Management: Agrees the duration, channels, and methods to provide Early-Life
Support (ELS)
• Knowledge Management
• Problem Management
• Release Management
• Service Desk
• Supplier Management
Making new features available to customers
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Once all the service components have been deployed, the organization is ready to make them
available to end users. While the release was planned in the previous step, it is being
implemented in this step. Releases of service components can be more than technical
procedures. It might be necessary to carefully coordinate technical and non-technical work, such
as sales and marketing campaigns.
In this step, the service components are provided with Early Life Support (ELS) for a short period
of time, before they move into a “business as usual” mode. ELS can take many forms and is
dependent on the needs of the organization and its customers, with options such as:
• Dedicated ELS team drawn from across the value stream.

• Super-users: Super-users are often drawn from the community of customers and users,
and act as promoters and champions within their organizations, on community forums,
social media, and other channels.
• Onsite, in-person support staff: Early life support can also be implemented through the
use of IT staff making themselves available at customer locations (or “on-site”).
• Configuration management
• Incident Management
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• Infrastructure and Platform Management
• Problem Management
• Project Management
• Relationship Management
• Release Management
• Service Desk
• Software Development and Management
• Supplier Management
Once the service components have been released, customers and users can interact with them
through the service relationship, thus generating the required outcomes and co-creating value.
It is conceivable to extend this value stream to include additional activities after the components
have been released, for example:
• Engaging with the requestor to identify any gaps in the new service, or unanticipated
outcomes, costs and risks that were not identified during the execution of the value
stream
• Identifying opportunities to improve the service, value stream, and contributing practices
Points to Consider
• A value stream always starts with demand, and always ends with value being created or
restored for one or more stakeholder
• A value stream can loop around and repeat value chain activities, reflecting the context
and the environment in which work is performed. However, a value stream can be as
flexible as the organization needs it to be. For example, the organization can add in
another stage during the work similar to a waterfall approach, or as iterative loops
between value chain activities.
• There are several factors to consider when deciding what constitutes a separate step in a
value stream, and what should be included within an existing step
Exercise
Working in groups of 3-4 people
• What are the main activities you expect to see in a value stream to create a new service?
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• Which practices would contribute to this value stream
2.2 Contribution of ITIL practices to a value stream for a new service
a) Service design
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The purpose of the service design practice is to design products and services that are fit for
purpose, fit for use, and that can be delivered by the organization and its ecosystem.
Service Design includes planning and organizing people, partners and suppliers, information,
communication, technology, and practices for new or changed products and services, and the
interaction between the organization and its customers.
It is important that a holistic, results-driven approach to all aspects of service design is adopted,
and that when changing or amending any of the individual elements of a service design, all other
aspects are considered. It is for this reason that the coordination aspect of service design with
the whole organization’s SVS is essential.
Designing a new or changed product or service should not be done in isolation, but should
consider the impact it will have on:
• other products and services

• all relevant parties, including customers, users, and suppliers
• the existing architectures
• the required technology
• the service management practices
• the necessary measurements and metrics.
Service design ensures that the products and services created:
• are business- and customer-oriented, focused, and driven

• are created for users to have a good experience
• are cost-effective
• meet the information and physical security requirements of the organization and any
external customers
• are flexible and adaptable, yet fit for purpose at the point of delivery
• can absorb an ever-increasing demand in the volume and speed of change
• meet increasing organizational and customer demands for continuous operation
• are managed and operated to an acceptable level of risk.
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Service Design Package: Service Design document(s) defining all aspects of an IT Service
and its Requirements through each stage of its Lifecycle.
A service design package (SDP) may be produced for each new IT Service, and updated
periodically, or during major changes and IT Service Retirement.
Defining the SDP. There are several key considerations to define an SDP:
• Design and document a service design strategy, including the agreed number of different
service design packages available.
• It is important to make sure that all four dimensions of service management are covered
within service design packages.
• Engage with the relevant stakeholders to agree the parameters for each practice by level
of service design package.
• Develop a communications and training strategy to ensure the service design packages
can be embedded effectively into the process of designing and provisioning services.
• Embed the process of using the service design packages into value stream relating to
design/transition, obtain/build, and deliver/support.
The Service Design contributes in the following manner in the support of the ITIL Service Value
Chain:
• Provides supplementary assessments on how the new service might be designed to meet
internal standards and policies around utility, warranty, brand, and other criteria, and will
contribute to the business case assessment as necessary
• Provides the skills, tools, and other resources necessary to design the customer
experience (CX) and user experience (UX) when interacting with the new service, and
document the same in the baseline service design package
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b) Software development and Management
Software is a set of instructions that tell the physical components (hardware) of a computer how
to work.
Software and infrastructure are service components that are combined with other service
components or resources to form products and services. Software is a crucial part of business: It
can provide value to customers through technology- enabled business services. Software
development becomes critical as most modern services become not software-aided, but
software-enabled.
Software Development is the design and construction of applications according to functional

and non-functional requirements and correction and enhancement of operational application
according to changing functional and non-functional requirements.
The purpose of the software development and management practice is to ensure that
applications meet internal and external stakeholder needs, in terms of functionality,
reliability, maintainability, compliance, and auditability.
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With the rate of change modern services are experiencing, services become ever-changing. It is
usual for the modern application to be modified throughout its lifecycle. This means that all the
activities which used to form maintenance are now part of development process.
Maintenance is the modification of the application as part of development, for both correction
and enhancement purposes.
Quick-fixes are often preferred to proper but time-consuming changes. The high rate of change
in software may lead to an accumulated amount of rework that will have to be done at some
point, known as a technical debt.
Technical Debt: The total rework backlog accumulated by choosing workarounds instead of
system solutions that would take longer.
In case of software development and management, it’s total amount of rework needed to repair
substandard (changes to) software.
SDLC model: the sequence in which the stages of the software development lifecycle are
executed. The major stages are:
• establish requirements
• design
• code
• test
• run/use the application.
There are three models of the SDLC:
• Waterfall model: each stage of the development lifecycle is executed in sequence,

resulting in a single delivery of the whole application for use.
• Incremental model: after the requirements and priorities for the whole application have
been established the application is developed in parts (builds).
• Iterative or evolutionary model: after the requirements and priorities for the whole
application have been partially established, the application is developed in separate
builds such as in the incremental model, but because the requirements could not be fully
established at the start, the design, coding, testing or the use of a build may lead to
refinement of the requirements, leading to refinement of part of the application in
another build.
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Like any other ITIL management practice, software development and management contribute to
multiple value streams. Remember, no value stream is made up of a single practice. Software
development and management combines with other practices to provide high-quality services to
consumers. The main value chain activities to which software development and management
contributes are Obtain/build; Deliver and support
• Provides supplementary assessments on how software components of the new service

might be engineered and developed, and its impact to ongoing application management
activities, and will contribute to the business case assessment as necessary.
• Provides the skills, tools, and other resources needed to create and refine an initial list of
epics and user stories, in line with the specifications in the service design package
• Provides the engineering skills, tools, and other resources needed to create new
application features, and to integrate new systems and other software components into
the existing service
• Provides IT application management resources to run the relevant software components
c) Deployment management
The deployment management practice enables the transition of products, services, and service
components between the environments.
Environment: A subset of the IT infrastructure that is used for a particular purpose.
List of example environments for an organization that develops software
Environment Purpose
Development/Integra Developing and integrating software

tion
Test Testing service components

Testing releases including products, services and other configuration
Staging items
Live/Production Delivering IT services to service consumers
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The purpose of the deployment management practice is to move new or changed

hardware, software, documentation, processes, or any other component to live
environments. It may also be involved in deploying components to other environments
for testing or staging
Deployment Management provides the skills, tools, and other resources needed to deploy
various service components (both technical and non-technical) into the live environment
Like any other ITIL management practice, the deployment management practice contributes to
multiple value streams. It is important to remember that a value stream is never formed from a
single practice. The deployment management practice combines with other practices to provide
high-quality services to consumers. The main value chain activities to which the practice
contributes are:
• Obtain and build

• Design and transition
The contribution of the deployment management practice to the service value chain is shown in
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d) Release management
The purpose of the release management practice is to make new and changed services
and features available for use.
The Release Management Practice contributes in the following manner in the support of the
ITIL Service Value Chain:
• It provides the skills, tools, and other resources to create and communicate the release
plan, and to update maintain the plan as development and deployment activities progress
• Provides the skills, tools, and other resources to finalize the Release (Launch) plan,
working with other groups in the organization (for example, Sales and Marketing)
departments to communicate these plans to users and customers
• Provides the skills, tools, and other resources to execute the Release (Launch) plan,
working with Sales and Marketing departments to ensure the release is successfully
completed
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The main value chain activities to which the practice contributes are:
• plan
• improve
• obtain/build
e) Service Validation and testing
The purpose of the service validation and testing practice is to ensure that new or changed
products and services meet defined requirements.
The service validation and testing practice includes dealing with risk and uncertainty that new or
changed products and services bring and establishing and executing the appropriate tests to
eliminate risk and uncertainty and overall improve the product or service.
The more complex a system the greater the testing required. However, exhaustive testing of even
simple systems is not typically possible given time and cost constraints. So, choosing what to test
is important.
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Based on the service validation, test strategy, and test plans are developed and executed.
A test strategy defines an overall approach to testing. It can apply to an environment, a platform,
a set of services, or an individual service. Testing should be performed equally on both in-house
developed systems and externally developed solutions. The test strategy is based on the service
acceptance criteria and should align with the requirements of appropriate stakeholders to ensure
testing matches the risk appetite and is fit for purpose. There are various types:
• Assertive and exploratory (investigative) testing

• An Investigative Testing approach (Exploratory)
• Continuous Testing
o Testing the Ideas
o Testing the Artefacts
o Testing the UX and UI Designs
o Testing the Architecture and Code Designs
o Testing the Code
o Testing the Operational Software
o Testing on Different Environments
o Testing the Release Pipelines
o Testing in Production
o Testing the Services Beyond Production
• Risk-based testing
• Testing quality
o Correctness vs Goodness
o Perceived Quality
o Different perspectives of quality
.
The Service Validation and testing Management Practice contributes in the following manner in
the support of the ITIL Service Value Chain:
• Provides the technical skills, tools, and other resources needed to document test cases,
carry out automated and manual testing, and provide feedback and reports from testing
activities
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The service validation and testing practice contributes to multiple value streams. It is important
to remember that a value stream is never formed from a single practice. The service validation
and testing practice combines with other practices to provide high-quality services to consumers.

• obtain/build.
The contribution of the service validation and testing practice to the service value chain is shown
f) Change Enablement
The change enablement practice aims to ensure that changes to services and their
components are controlled and that they meet the organization’s change-related needs
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Authorized changes should enable the desired outcomes and meet the organization’s
requirements regarding change throughput (the number of changes made and the speed of
change realization) and risk management. Flexibility and agility permeate this practice because
they are key aspects of a modern organization.
The change enablement practice incorporates three premises:

• Changes are planned and realized in the context of value streams. The practice is
integrated into value streams and ensures that changes are effective, safe, and timely in
order to meet stakeholders’ expectations.
• The practice does not aim to unify all the changes planned and carried out in an
organization into one big picture: in a digital environment, where hundreds of changes
may be happening simultaneously, this is neither possible nor required.
• The practice should focus on balancing effectiveness, throughput, compliance, and risk
control for all changes in the defined scope.
Definition: Practice success factor : A complex functional component of a practice that is

required for the practice to fulfil its purpose.
A practice success factor (PSF) is more than a task or activity; it includes components from all
four dimensions of service management. The nature of the activities and resources of PSFs within
a practice may differ, but together they ensure that the practice is effective.
The change enablement practice includes the following PSFs:
• ensuring that changes are realized in a timely and effective manner

• minimizing the negative impacts of changes
• ensuring stakeholder satisfaction with changes and change enablement
• meeting change-related governance and compliance requirements.
The focus is:
• Ensuring that changes are realized in a timely and effective manner. The focus of the
change enablement practice is the effectiveness and timeliness of the changes. Change
effectiveness can be measured by the levels of outputs and outcomes of the change. In
the context of change outputs, effective change can be described as ‘a change that
successfully transforms resources from the initial state to the pre-defined target state’.
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However, the target state is rarely the goal of the change; the target state enables an
outcome.
• Minimizing the negative impact of changes. Changes are sources of disruption and risk.
The change enablement practice is expected to keep risks to an acceptable level.
• Ensuring stakeholder satisfaction. Many stakeholders have an interest in changes.
• The change enablement practice ensures that stakeholders are identified and that their
expectations are captured, considered, and met as appropriate.
The Change Enablement Practice contributes in the following manner in the support of the ITIL
Service Value Chain:
• It provides the skills, tools, and other resources needed to submit a Requests for Change
(RFCs), assess and approve RFCs, and to schedule changes to various service
components
The change enablement practice contributes to multiple value streams. The change enablement
practice combines with other practices to provide high-quality services to consumers. The main
value chain activities to which the practice contributes are:
• obtain/build
• improve.
The contribution of the change enablement practice to the service value chain is shown in Figure
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2.3 Using a value stream to provide user support
Restoration of a live service
In this value stream model, we examine typical activities that organizations undertake to support
an existing service. This archetype is agnostic to the nature of the service and can be used to
describe a value stream to support services provided to consumers within the organization or
external to the organization.
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Typical considerations when designing this value stream include:
• Identifying stakeholders, and what the creation or restoration of value means to them,
for example:
o To a user
o To the organization’s compliance officer
o To the service owner
• Taking an outside-in approach to understanding the impact of incidents, and connecting
these assessments to descriptions of value for various stakeholders
• Defining the scope of the value stream, and defining one value stream encompassing all
activities within scope to create an end-to-end, holistic vision of how support creates or
restores value
• Highlighting activities performed by partners and suppliers that might introduce risks or
dependencies to the successful creation or restoration of value
• Understanding what (or how) systems should be integrated, and data shared across
multiple centers of activities
This value stream describes seven key steps:
1. Acknowledge and register the user query

2. Investigate the query, reclassify it as an incident, and attempt to fix it
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3. Get a fix from the specialist team
4. Deploy the fix
5. Verify that the incident has been resolved
6. Request feedback from the user
7. Identify opportunities to improve the overall system (that is, service, value stream, or
practices)
Notes:
• This value stream branches at step 2 – if the initial attempt to fix the incident is successful,
then value is restored without any further activity (represented as the dash line from step
2 to Value).
• The restoration of value after Step 5 could be the end of the value stream, but there are
further activities, described in steps 6 & 7 (asking for and processing feedback); for
example, it is common for organizations to ask only a random sample of customers for
feedback
This value stream is triggered by a user who finds themselves unable to use a live product or
service. This loss of productivity leads to “value leakage”, wherein the consumer is unable to
derive maximum value from the sub-optimal product or service.
Demand could also originate within the service provider, when monitoring tools proactively alert
the organization to failures that may or may not have impacted users. In this scenario, the value
stream might bypass Step 1 or switch the order of Steps 1 & 2. In other words:
1. The service provider might start working to resolve the incident without being prompted
to do so by a user
2. If required, proactively contact users to notify them of an ongoing incident.
3. If required, follow up with users after the incident has been resolved
The demand for value to be restored (or “value restoration”) drives this value stream.
Acknowledge and register the user query
The first step in the value stream, is to engage with the customer or user, to recognize and
acknowledge the demand, and to record details about the query. At this stage, the user contact
is still a query, as it has not yet been triaged and recognized as an incident.
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• Service Catalogue Management:

• Service Desk
Investigate the incident and attempt to fix it
As the query is being recorded, a trained support agent, or equivalent automation can recognize
and re-categorize the query as an incident, thus initiating a script or standard procedure for
classifying the record accordingly (or creating a new incident record linked to the initial query –
depending on the organization’s procedures and tools).
Once a user-initiated incident is registered, an attempt to quickly identify its nature and apply a
known solution is usually made.
Support agents often follow a script, or workflow, of activities that allows them to attempt one
or more fixes. If one of these fixes recovers the service to its normal state, then value has been
restored, and the value stream can end. If none of these fixes work, then the issue can be
escalated to a specialist role for further investigation.
• Configuration Management
• Monitoring and Event Management
• Service Desk
• Service level management
Investigation and diagnosis are often a highly technical activity, but should also pay attention to
non-technical factors, such as environmental or financial ones, for example:
• The reason for the network outage is because an ongoing storm is affecting local cables
or satellite connectivity
• The reason why a streaming service no longer works is because the customer or user’s
credit card was declined
Get a fix from the specialist team
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In this step, the incident is escalated to, or referred to, a specialist team as initial attempts to
restore the service were unsuccessful. This can happen in several ways (depending on context),
some of which involve passing control over to the specialist team. For example:
• The support agent can look for a patch on a vendor website (this does not pass control of
the incident to the vendor)
• The support agent raises an incident with a vendor (this does not pass control of the user’s
incident, but instead creates a parallel incident ticket managed by the vendor)
• The support agent escalates the incident to an internal engineering team (this passes
control of the incident to the engineering team)
• The support agent asks an outsourced engineering team to provide a fix (this may, or may
not, involve passing control of the incident to the engineering team)
The fix can also be something readily available, such as a publicly available patch or upgrade. In
some cases, the fix may be physical, such as replacing a faulty hard drive. Often, when dealing
with custom applications or hardware, fixes have to be built before they can be deployed.
• Infrastructure and platform management
• Service Desk
• Service financial management
• Service validation and testing
• Software development and management
• Supplier management
Deploy the fix
Once the fix has been obtained, tested, and validated, it can be deployed to the user, or to a
production environment. Deployment can take many forms, for example:
• Using a CI/CD pipeline to distribute the fix across a production environment

• Delivering a hardware component (e.g. a new hard disk) to a data center, where it is
subsequently provisioned
• Delivering a hardware component (e.g. a new laptop) to the end user office, where it is
configured by local IT support staff
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• Remotely logging on to the user’s PC to install a patch from a network drive
• Deployment management
• Service Desk
• Service financial management
Verify that the incident has been resolved
Once the fix has been deployed, the next step is to verify that the incident has been resolved.
This step is quite similar to steps 1 and 2 earlier in the value stream, as it involves the support
agent communicating with, and empathizing with, the user. In this model, value can be perceived
differently by the user, and the organization, for example:
• The user might perceive value as a combination of the time it took to restore the service,
the associated loss of productivity (and the frustration from the loss of productivity), any
additional issues or complications that may have arisen while waiting for service
restoration, the experience of working with IT support, and the perceived reliability of the
service
• The IT support agent might calculate value based on the experience of working with the
user, with specialist teams, the time taken to interact with various groups and update
relevant records
• The specialist team might perceive value using the experience of working with either the
IT support agent or the user, the complexity of creating and deploying the fix, and
updating relevant records
Moreover, while the incident might be resolved at a technical level, the user might need
additional assistance, for example:
• To know that the service has been restored

• To re-enable access and consumption of the service
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• To address any outstanding or additional concerns that arose due to the incident
As a result, it is advisable to check back with the user to ensure that value has been restored
satisfactorily. This helps in increasing empathy between IT support and the user, which can (in
the long term) lead to increased trust between both parties.
The incident can be deemed to be resolved when the affected product or service is operating at
optimal levels – in other words, when value leakage has been rectified.
Many IT support tools assign statuses to incident records to distinguish between “resolving” and
“closing” an incident in the following way:
• Resolving an incident means that the underlying technical concerns have been addressed
• Closing an incident means that the fix, and associated restoration of value, has been
confirmed by the user
Procedures to resolve or close an incident are part of the underlying design of the incident
management practice and are subsequently used by the value stream. In this section, we
generally refer to resolving an incident.
• Service Desk
Request feedback from the customer
Many organizations ask for feedback from users after incidents have been resolved in order to
identify opportunities to improve the service, the way they communicate with the users,
procedures to fix the incident, or to improve key practices. It may also be necessary to identify
and filter out environmental, personal, or professional factors that might bias the feedback (in
either a positive or negative way), for example:
• A parent worried about a sick child might be overly negative when sharing feedback
• An IT support agent worried about upcoming layoffs might not be focused on daily work
• A business development manager who has landed a big sale might be more kind and
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forgiving of IT support issues
Increasing empathy and trust between the user and IT support can help improve communication
and reduce the impact of biases. Feedback can be collected in a variety of ways, but should
ultimately be stored in a central location, to aid analysis and management reporting.
• Continual Improvement
• Service Desk
Identify opportunities to improve overall system
Once feedback has been collected from all relevant stakeholders, it can be analysed – either in
isolation, or in conjunction with other data (e.g. historical data about the service, the service
provider or service consumer organization, external constraints, etc.) – in order to identify
opportunities to improve for example:
• The service provider organization (or more generally, the service value system and its
components)
• The value stream, and associated steps, actions, and tasks
• The relationship with the user, partners and suppliers, and other stakeholders
• The ways of defining and perceiving value
Any improvements identified should be logged in the service provider’s continual improvement
register, thus creating value for the service provider organization, and components of the
provider’s SVS. Once logged in the register, improvement opportunities can be prioritized against
other work in the SVS.
• Continual Improvement
• Deployment Management
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• Monitoring and Event Management
• Problem management
• Risk Management
• Service Desk
• Service Financial Management
• Service Validation and Testing
2.4 Contribution of ITIL practices to a value stream for user support
a) Service desk
The purpose of the service desk practice is to capture demand for incident
resolution and service requests. It should also be the entry point and single
point of contact for the service provider for all users.
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Practice success factor: A complex functional component of a practice that is required for the
practice to fulfil its purpose.
A practice success factor (PSF) is more than a task or activity, as it includes components of all
four dimensions of service management. The nature of the activities and resources of PSFs
within a practice may differ, but together they ensure that the practice is effective.
The service desk practice includes the following PSFs:
• enabling and continually improving effective, efficient, and convenient communications

between the service provider and its users
• enabling the effective integration of user communications into value streams.
The Service Desk contributes in the following manner in the support of the ITIL Service Value
Chain:
• Provides the skills, tools, and other resources to allow the customer or user to contact
service support; to enable customer support agents to empathize and manage
communications with the customer or user; to retrieve and communicate information
about expected resolution time
• Provides the skills, tools, and other resources necessary to enable support agents to
empathize and manage communications with various stakeholders
• Provides the skills, tools, and other resources necessary to identify opportunities to
improve the practice, and record them in the continual improvement register
The service desk practice combines with other practices to provide high-quality services to
consumers. The main value chain activities to which this practice contributes are:
• engage
The contribution of the service desk practice to the service value chain is shown in Figure
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b) Incident management
The purpose of the incident management practice is to minimize the negative

impact of incidents by restoring normal service operation as quickly as
possible.
The incident management practice ensures that periods of unplanned service unavailability or
degradation are minimized, thus reducing negative impacts on users. There are two main factors
enabling this: early incident detection and the quick restoration of normal operation.
Detecting incidents early
It used to be common practice to register most incidents based on information from end users
and IT specialists. This method of sourcing information is still widely used, but good practice
nowadays suggests detecting and registering incidents automatically. This can be done
immediately after incidents occur and before they start affecting users. This approach has the
following benefits:
• Earlier incident detection decreases the time of service unavailability or degradation.

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• The higher quality of the initial data supports the correct response and resolution of
incidents, including automated resolution, otherwise known as self-healing.
• Some incidents remain invisible to users, improving user satisfaction and customer
satisfaction.
• Some incidents may be resolved before they affect the service quality agreed with
customers, improving the perceived service and the formally reported service quality.
• Costs associated with incidents may decrease.
Resolving incidents quickly and efficiently: This PSF is vital for the success of the incident
management practice and for general service quality. After incidents are detected they should
be handled effectively and efficiently, considering the complexity of the environment:
• In simple situations, such as recurring and well-known incidents, pre-defined resolution

procedures are likely to be effective.
• In complex situations, where the exact nature of the incident is unknown but the systems
and components are familiar to the support teams and the organization has access to
expert knowledge, incidents are usually routed to a specialist group or groups for
diagnosis and resolution.
• In very complex situations, where it is difficult or impossible to define an expert area and
group, or where defined groups of experts fail to find a solution, a collective approach
may be useful. This technique is known as swarming.
Incident prioritization: Incidents should be resolved as soon as possible. However, the resources
of the teams involved in incident resolution are limited and these teams are often simultaneously
involved in other types of work. Some incidents should be prioritized to minimize any negative
impacts on users.
The Incident Management Practice contributes in the following manner in the support of the
• Provides the skills, tools, and other resources necessary to register the incident, and the
information about how long it might take to resolve the incident
• Provides the skills, tools, and other resources necessary to update the incident record
with details of activities to build and test the fix
• Provides the skills, tools, and other resources necessary to update the incident record
with details of activities to deploy the fix
• Provides the skills, tools, and other resources necessary to update (resolve or close) the
incident record with details of activities of the user interaction
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The incident management practice contributes to multiple value streams. Even when a value
stream is focused on incident resolution, other practices are involved, such as service desk,
monitoring and event management, service configuration management, change enablement,
supplier management, infrastructure and platform management, and software development and
management.
The incident management practice is primarily concerned with the restoration of normal systems
or service operation in various work environments. The main value chain activities to which the
practice contributes are:
• engage
The contribution of the

incident management
practice to the service
value chain is shown in
Figure
c) Problem management
The purpose of the problem management practice is to reduce the likelihood and
impact of incidents by identifying actual and potential causes of incidents, and
managing workarounds and known errors.
The problem management practice includes the following PSFs (Practice success factor):
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• identifying and understanding the problems and their impact on services

• optimizing problem resolution and mitigation.
Identifying and understanding the problems and their impact on services: Organizations should
understand the errors in their products because they may cause incidents and affect service
quality and customer satisfaction. The problem management practice ensures problem
identification and thus contributes to the continual improvement of products and services. This
is more effective if performed proactively rather than reactively.
Optimizing problem resolution and mitigation: When problems have been identified, they should
be handled effectively and efficiently. It is rarely possible to fix (remove) all the problems in an
organization’s products, but identification without resolution is significantly less valuable for the
organization and its customers. A balanced approach should be defined for problem mitigation,
namely one that considers the associated costs, risks, and impacts on the service quality.
The Problem Management Practice contributes in the following manner in the support of the
• Provides the skills, tools, and other resources to investigate and mitigate possible causes
of the incident(s)

• improve.
The contribution of the problem management practice to the service value chain is shown in
Figure
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d) Knowledge management
The purpose of the knowledge management practice is to maintain and improve

the effective, efficient, and convenient use of information and knowledge across
the organization.
Knowledge management (KM) is a way of transforming information and organizational

intellectual capital into persistent value for an employees and service/products consumers. The
knowledge management practice aims to provide right information to the right people at the
right moment in order to build an evolutionary environment where:
• people are eager to learn new, unlearn old, gain and share their experience and insights
• decision-making capabilities are improved
• change-adaptive culture exists
• performance grows according to organizational strategy
• data-driven and/or innovation approach is used throughout an organization
Knowledge management contributes to every part of the SVS. The practice incorporates
premises:
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• Knowledge is processed and used in the context of value streams. The practice is
integrated into value streams and ensures that information is provided effectively and
timely to meet stakeholders’ expectations
• The practice should focus to provide value-based information which is available, accurate,
reliable, relevant, complete, timing, and compliant in defined scope
The Knowledge Management Practice contributes in the following manner in the support of the
• Provides the skills, tools, and other resources necessary to lookup technical information
and workarounds that can help in the investigation, diagnosis, and fixing of the incident
• Provides the skills, tools, and other resources necessary to lookup technical information
that can help in the investigation and diagnosis of the incident; to update existing
knowledge records with information about the fix
• Provides the skills, tools, and other resources necessary to update existing knowledge
records with information about the fix
• Provides the skills, tools, and other resources necessary to update existing knowledge
records with information about the fix and the restoration of value
The knowledge management practice combines with other practices to provide high-quality
services to consumers. The main value chain activities to which the practice contributes are:
• improve
The contribution of the knowledge management practice to the service value chain is shown in
Figure
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e) Service level management
The purpose of the service level management practice is to set clear business-
based targets for service levels, and to ensure that delivery of services is properly
assessed, monitored, and
managed against these targets.
The service level management practice helps to set and manage a shared view of the quality of
services between the service provider and the service consumer, aimed at all key stakeholders
on both sides. This shared view is usually described in an agreement document, which may be
written in various levels of formality. This applies to both the expected and actual service quality,
from initial contact to the present, and covers service offerings and proposed value throughout
the entirety of the service relationship. The service level management practice also includes
monitoring and evaluation of the actual service quality and continual improvement of the
services and agreements
The service level management practice includes the following PSFs (Practice Success Factor):
• establishing a shared view of target service levels with customers

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• overseeing how the organization meets the defined service levels through the collection,
analysis, storage, and reporting of the relevant metrics for the identified services
• performing service reviews to ensure that the current set of services continues to meet
the needs of the organization and its customers
• capturing and reporting on improvement opportunities, including performance against
defined service levels and stakeholder satisfaction.
Like any other ITIL management practice, the service level management practice contributes to
multiple value streams. It is important to remember that a value stream is never formed from a
single practice. The service level management practice combines with other practices to provide
high-quality services to consumers. The main value chain activities to which the practice
contributes are:
• plan
• engage
• improve.
The contribution of the service level management practice to the service value chain is shown in
below:
• Provides information to assess impact of the incident and to plan restoration

• Provides information to assess sufficiency of the restored/achieved service level and
timeliness of the restoration
• Provides information, tools and skills to register and assess service improvement
initiatives
• plan
• engage
• improve.
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The contribution of the service

level management practice to
the service value chain is shown
in Figure
f) Monitoring and event management
The purpose of the Monitoring and Event Management (monitoring and event
management) practice is to systematically observe services and service components, and
record and report selected changes of state identified as events.
This practice identifies and prioritizes infrastructure, services, business processes, and
information security events, and establishes the appropriate response to those events, including
responding to conditions that could lead to potential faults or incidents.
Some definitions are important:
• Monitoring: It is the repeated observation of a system, practice, process, service, or

other entity to detect events and to ensure that the current status is known.
• Metric: A measurement or calculation that is monitored or reported for management
and improvement.
• Threshold: is a value that falls outside acceptable ranges. It can also be called an
“alerting parameter”, because an alert notification will result from the parameter being
exceeded.
• Alert: A notification that a threshold has been reached, something has changed, or a
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failure has occurred.
• Event: Any change of state that has significance for the management of a service or
other configuration item (CI).
The contribution of the Monitoring and event management practice to the service value chain
is shown in below:
• Provides access to monitoring tools and logs to assist in the investigation and diagnosis
of the incident
3 Creating, Delivering & Supporting Services
In this chapter we would look at increasing efficiency for delivery of services to meet varying
demand for services. This often creates imbalances which creates queues.
Queues occur wherever the demand for work exceeds the capacity to complete it within the
expected timeframe. In an ideal situation, an organization would have no variation in demand
and would have the appropriate quality and quantity of resources needed to satisfy it.
Queues or backlogs in which work items need to be prioritized. Prioritization is an activity

commonly associated with support and software development work (e.g. prioritizing incident
records or prioritizing a sprint backlog), but its use is universal
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3.1 Coordinating and prioritizing activities
a) Managing queues and backlogs
A workflow is a defined sequence of processes and tasks which convert material, provide
services, or process information. It is important to manage the flow of work to ensure that there
is no pile up of work, and limited slack time. This pile up of work is usually called a queue.
Queues occur whenever the demand for work exceeds the capacity to complete it.
A Queue can be defined as a list of jobs waiting to be processed while a backlog is a

buildup of work that needs to be completed.
.
Points to note:
• Work waiting in queues is an interruption to flow.

• Dynamic reallocation of resources can help to mitigate queue effects
In services this is important since the demand can be unpredictable, we need to have slack time
to deal with variation caused by when the work is required to be done. This is so as we cannot
always add people to deal with occasional peak loads.
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At a high level, if demand is created when idle capacity exists, then there is no need for
prioritization of work, and that work to fulfill demand can start immediately. However, when
demand exceeds capacity, organizations often manage demand and minimize queues to avoid
the need to prioritize work, through:
• Reducing variation in demand for value, for example by:

o Using pricing mechanisms based on volume of work (for example, the first 10 requests
are charged at a different rate than the next 10)
o Using pricing mechanisms based on when demand occurs (for example, a restaurant
offers a discount on weeknight service)
o Using pricing mechanisms based on quality (for example, a business class plane ticket
costs three times as much as an economy class plane ticket)
o Altering customer expectations around time to complete work (for example, requests
made after 11am will be completed the next working day
• Reducing variation in how much demand is taken into a value stream or step, for example:
o Employees can submit one request per quarter to change their benefits
• Increasing how much demand can be satisfied within a given period of time, for example:
o Using automation to speed up processing of “toil” (that is, common and repetitive
tasks that scale in a linear fashion)
o Increasing the size of teams, or the number of teams, so that more work can be done
in parallel
• Reducing the cost of increasing or decreasing capacity, for example:
o Using elastic cloud platforms to quickly increase or decrease available computing
power
o Outsourcing staffing needs to professional services organizations
• Using Shift-left techniques to deflect demand, or prevent demand from being created, for
example:
o Using of a self-service knowledge base that enables users to troubleshoot common
issues without the need for specialist skills
o Using automated testing integrated with development tools to reduce demand for
seperate testing and validation resources prior to deployment
“Shift Left is a practice intended to find and prevent defects early in the software delivery
process. The idea is to improve quality by moving tasks to the left as early in the lifecycle as
possible. Shift Left means shifting closer to source”
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Note: The above list highlights commonly used methods of managing demand, and depending
on context and complexity, other methods might be more appropriate.
• Knowledge management: implementation of an effective process of capturing resolution

information and disseminating to agents as they need it can have a significant reducing
effect on the build-up of queues of unresolved work, by reducing the amount of repetitive
investigative work. X
• Automation: primarily the removal of manual, repetitive “toil” which arbitrarily delays
service interactions, and which could potentially be handled by machines
• Self-service: limiting work coming in to the queues in the first place by enabling users to
serve themselves without waiting for service from a provider. Self-service tools are also a
useful means to provide customers with a way to check their current progress through
the queueing system, potentially reducing chase-up calls and increasing satisfaction.
• Managed flow: for example, by providing fixed time windows to each customer in which
they can introduce their issue.
• Provision of alternatives: offering users a different choice, such as incentives to defer
entry into the queuing system until a later time.
• “Congestion charging”: providing disincentives to entering queuing systems at peak
times, to discourage the build-up of non-urgent work in already crowded queues.
• Queue management: use of a human or automated queue manager to adjust,
continuously or at critical times, the allocation of people and resources to the optimal
configuration for the current queue situation.
b) Prioritizing work
Prioritization of work to create, deliver, and support services is necessary to co-create value while
minimizing costs and risks that arise from unfulfilled demand and from idle capacity. In other
words, prioritization is a technique within an organization’s risk management practice. All work
needs to be prioritised because we never have sufficient resources to manage everything
immediately and perfectly. Prioritizing work is not just for incident but also applies to requests,
defects, development requests, projects, improvement opportunities etc.
Prioritization of work can take place at different levels of granularity, with different implications
on the wider system, and with different levels of impact on user or customer experience:
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• Prioritization conducted at a value stream level increases a need to manage user or
customer expectations, to keep them engaged, and to provide regular status updates, as
from their perspective, value realization is being delayed
• Prioritization conducted at a value stream step, action, or task level can result in the
constraining flow of work to the point that resources used later in the value stream
remain idle or create a buildup of work (in a queue or a backlog) earlier in the value
stream. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as “creating a bottleneck” or “creating
a constraint”
As much as possible, prioritization should be data driven, rather than emotionally driven, and
should consider all available information.
There are many different techniques to prioritize work, and thereby minimizing queues and wait
times. These techniques can be broadly categorized as follows:
Techniques based on resource availability or quality: Prioritization can consider the availability of
resources to complete the work. For example, if an infrastructure support team has one
networking specialist who is assigned all network support cases, then the team can prioritize non-
network related cases while the network specialist is occupied.
Prioritization can also consider current workload on resources in environments using shared
resources, when there are no differences in quality between resources or variations in size of
work item. For example, support center automation might assign incoming calls or chats to idle
support agents, or to agents with less workload.
• Techniques based on time factors: Prioritization can consider the age of work items, for
example:
o First-in, first-out: the next oldest waiting item is dealt with
o Last-in, first-out: the newest waiting item is dealt with
• Alternatively, prioritization can consider the time required to complete work items, for
example:
o Shortest item first: the item that can be completed the quickest is dealt with next
o Longest item first: the item that requires the most time to complete is dealt with next
• Techniques based on economic or financial factors: Prioritization can consider the

monetary benefits or dis-benefits of work items. For example, an organization that has
the ability to process just work item; is likely to prioritize the item that has the highest
economic benefit (for example, the feature that earns most revenue, the incident that
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has highest financial impact, the project that has the highest return on investment, and
so on).
• Alternatively, prioritization can consider order items based on economic penalty (the
compliance feature that reduces a regulatory fine, the support ticket that might breach
SLA, and so on)
• Techniques based on source or type of demand: Priority can be given to sources that are
entitled to more immediate attention, for example, a request from the CIO of an
organization might be prioritized over a similar request from a sales clerk. It is common
to see organizations create (and price) levels of entitlement, for example, many
technology vendors and support service providers typically create contracts where
“Silver” tier customers are prioritized over “Bronze” tier customers.
• It is also common to find more than one prioritization technique working in tandem. For
example:
o In the Cost of Delay method, prioritization considers the economic impact or penalty
over time.
o In the Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF), prioritization considers the Cost of Delay
AND duration of work.
Triage is the process of determining the priority of patients' treatments based on the
severity of their condition
The triage concept was originated in a military medical context, effective triage saves lives by
helping emergency medical personnel rapidly assess wound or illness severity and establish the
right protocols, in the right order, to reduce disturbance and maintain patient health and, time
later, recovery; all of this during crisis, when every second counts, and is now widely used
in information technology (IT) and business environments.
In digital services world, organisations constantly triage requests and issues to decide which ones
are most urgent. High-priority requests/issues are dealt with as they occur, and mid-priority
issues are taking care when there are no High-priority issues remaining.
If there are no mid-priority requests/issues unresolved, low-priority requests/issues may be

addressed. However, that time might never come, causing the lowest priority requests may never
be dealt with unless escalated and re-examined. In agile software development (ASD), requests
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are usually triaged at the start of each iteration. Because an iteration is a short development
cycle, it's vital to deal with high-priority requirements quickly to finish on time.
Queues and Customer Experience
Queues have a bearing on Customer Experience. To avoid negative customer experience, we can:
• Mitigate this with reliable status updates

• Keep users engaged in the situation
• Request updates from users to create a sense of activity and involvement
• Set expectations of when users will be updated and then meet these
Customers may be more willing to endure waiting times in queues if they are kept informed and
involved with the situation, for example, through detailed status updates or even requesting
customer inputs before the work has actually been commenced, to create a sense of activity and
involvement.
However, it is important to remember that customers who are led to expect an outcome by a
stated times (such as an expected time of resolution, or a scheduled follow-up or appointment)
will typically be relatively content to wait until that time arrives. From that moment onwards,
any delay, even small, will tend to impact satisfaction in a significant way.
Swarming is a method of managing work in which many different specialist resources or

stakeholders begin working on a work item until it becomes clear which one of them is
the best placed to continue and which can move on to other work items.
Swarming, in the context of customer support, is generally positioned as an alternative

operational method to a formally organised system of tiered support groups. Some of the
arguments against the structure and in favour of swarming include:
• Tiered Support creates multiple queues. While Level 1 support tends to be reactive and
real time, any case that cannot be resolved at this level, and is hence assigned to another
team, typically in a different team, immediately enters a queue. Its nature changes,
turning it from a current activity into a backlog item. This is a particularly problematic
concept in lean-derived practices such as DevOps, in which accumulated work-in-progress
is seen as something to be actively reduced.
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• Tiered Support may delay access to the correct resolver. If a ticket has to progress
through several triage queues on the way to the appropriate expert, then structural
delays have been introduced.
• Tiered Support may be prone to ticket “bouncing” and multiple reassignments. The first
time a new assignee sees the case ticket is when it arrives in their queue. However, the
team who assigned it to them is likely to have less relevant expertise to address the issue
(hence the reassignment), and may not have provided sufficient qualified information for
the new assignee to act. Or, they may have selected the wrong team for the assignment.
In each case, the resolution in a tiered structure is likely to be another assignment, either
onwards or back to the previous assignee. This can result in multiple reassignments of a
ticket.
• Tiered Support can cause individuals to be overwhelmed
While one positive outcome of multi-tiered support is the prevention of easily-solved tickets
finding their way to teams overqualified to work on them, it does not protect key specialists from
high volumes of difficult cases.
Swarming is intended to address these perceived shortfalls by bringing a much more dynamic,
flexible and collaborative approach, characterised by:
• Dynamic cross-functional collaboration, bringing different skills together into combined

teams.
• Flexible team organization, rather than rigid, hierarchical structures.
• Reactive or deterministic initiation of swarms according to context and need.
• Individual and group autonomy, rather than dogmatic process
• A focus on the avoidance of build-up of backlogged Work in Progress.
• Cross-pollination of skills and experience.
Initiating and organizing swarming
While the term “Swarming” encompasses a range of behaviours, the most ITIL-relevant and
definitive encapsulation of the concept is the Consortium for Service Innovation’s definition of
“Intelligent Swarming”. This framework defines attributes of a successful swarming adoption in
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terms of organizations functioning with one collaborative team, without tiers of supports or
escalations (although some of its specific characteristics, such as the person taking the request
owning it until it is resolved, may or may not be suitable for each swarming context. Also, many
organizations retain some characteristics of the tiered approach, such as specialist escalation
teams, while using swarming to reduce negative behaviours within that system such as multiple
reassignment).
Because of the self-organizing nature of swarming, there is no definitive structure. However,

some examples from real organizations include:
• Dispatch swarms, which meet frequently through each day to review the incoming feed
of tickets, and cherry-pick quick solutions, while also validating the correct information is
present on any support record which requires onward assignment.
• Backlog swarms, which are convened on a flexible or periodic basis by product or service
specialists who need input from members of other specialist groups, which might
otherwise result in a ticket being reassigned between them.
• Drop-in swarms, in which experts are made available continuously in support of front-line
service personnel.
Dispatch Swarming is a process of opportunistically dealing with items which can be

resolved immediately, prior to them fully entering the queuing system.
Dispatch Swarming does not preclude some items of work entering a more formally managed
queuing system, and in fact may enhance the operation of the queueing system by preventing
the accumulation of trivial but queue-extending tasks.
Swarming is also a useful tool to avoid a particularly negative scenario, in which a piece of work
moves repeatedly between different technical specialist teams. This silo-to-silo motion results in
the ticket entering multiple workstreams sequentially, and hence its impact on the flow (and
potentially its contribution to queue accumulation) is multiplied. In these cases, it is often better
to use a Swarming technique to bring together a cross functional group to collaborate on the
work item.
Challenges with swarming
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• There may be a perceived increase in “per record” cost - because 2nd and 3rd tier staff,
with a higher cost per unit of time, may be seen to be getting involved in more cases,
sooner.
• It can be difficult to evaluate individual contributions – which can make pre-existing
monitoring and reporting obsolete.
• Dominant individuals - as with any human interaction, certain individuals may overwhelm
others in the conversation.
• Finding the right people for a swarm is difficult – a challenge explored in detail in the
“Intelligent Swarming” blueprint published by the Consortium for Service Innovation.
Swarming only works with significant executive support. It requires the loosening of rules which
are often entrenched in practices, metrics and incentives. It requires managers to step away from
a cybernetic, process driven model, in which they pull the levers, to enable a more adaptive
culture of self-reliance amongst their staff.
3.2 Value of the service value system
a) Buy vs build considerations
Organizations are often faced with the decision of building software or services inhouse or
procuring from external sources. The decision is further complicated with the enormous amounts
of packaged point solutions and open source codes means that there are multiple options for
just about every component of a software project. So do you build the source code inhouse or
buy an off-the shelf solution?
The decision can be seen from the risk, cost and problem statement perspective. How any
organization views this decision can be viewed from their circumstances. A successful start-up
CTO put it very succinctly:
‘If am doing something the same way as everyone else is, and it is available for purchase, I buy it,
because that means it is not core value that I am providing. It may be a core process that I need
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to have in order to be in business, but that does not mean it is core technology, and in fact I am
better off using a product that was purpose built and is maintained by people for whom it is core.’
To understand the considerations, it is important to recognize biases or pressures that arise

from:
• familiarity with a prior version of a tool, or with the tool vendor’s products and services
• aggressive sales tactics by the vendor
• a strong desire to work with new tools or skills simply because they are new
• prior experience in using the product and service without recognizing the difference in
context
• pressures to reduce cost, often at the expense of quality.
Building service components using existing resources works better in contexts where:
• the service component heavily relies on knowledge of the organization and its business
• customer demand for personalized products, services, or experience is high
• the ecosystem is volatile or subject to rapid change; for example, when customers face
little or no cost to switch between competitors, the provider’s business model is rapidly
changing, or the use of products or services is evolving
• service components lack mass-market adoption
• compliance to standards and policies is a high priority
• the service provider is undergoing rapid growth, organically or through acquisitions, or
transformations, which can lead to inconsistent or frequently changing requirements.
Buying (or otherwise acquiring) service components from partners and suppliers works well
when:
• in-house resources are scarce or highly utilized in other areas

• the skills or competencies needed to create, operate, and maintain the component are
highly specialized and would take time to build; for example, most organizations do not
manufacture their own computing equipment
• the processes to build products and services are immature and need to be developed
and implemented
• components or services are highly commoditized
• the demand for service components is low or subject to significant fluctuation; for
example, seasonal demand or demand triggered by rare events
• the service component is not core to the strategy, brand, or competitive differentiation
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of the service provider
• creating the service component is predictable and repetitive work
• the ecosystem is stable and generally not subject to volatility.
Commodification
Commodification is the transformation of goods, services, ideas and people into commodities or
objects of trade. This means that any good or service loses its unique brand-value or value and is
reduced to any tradeable object based on price. This enables easy availability of services or
goods.
The rapid development of technologies and adoptions seen over the last few years has followed
this pattern. Just consider the following:
• As the use of data centres became more prevalent and as computing power increased,
virtualization tools emerged to manage virtual infrastructure.
• As the cost of computing and storage fell and as virtualization tools matured, cloud
computing models (infrastructure-as-a-service) emerged.
• As cloud computing models matured, other cloud-enabled platforms emerged, such as
platforms-as-a-service, software-as-a-service, and most recently, functions-as-a-service.
Take any example like cab sharing, food delivery, financial services apps and services. The rapid
speed of commodification forces reduction in profit margins as there is rapid entry of
competition, able to use technology components to deploy rapidly their own competing services.
This means that when considering whether to build or buy a service component, the current level
of ‘commodification’ and ongoing industry trends to commodify that component should be
considered.
Defining requirements for service components
When defining requirements, an organization should reflect the needs of all relevant
stakeholders. As a result, requirements for service components should cover a broad range of
topics and should not be limited to the functional needs that are articulated by users.
Requirements that other stakeholders might address include topics such as:
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• maintainability and supportability of the component
• geographic location of vendor resources
• cultural alignment between the organization and the vendor
• cost of service consumption, such as skills needed in-house, and financial outflow over
time18
• alignment with the organization’s business, technical, and information architecture
• vendor brand and public image
• interchangeability of vendors.
A common approach to defining requirements is to focus on the technical (functional and non-
functional) features of a product or the technical quality of a service. It is sometimes better to
define requirements using outcomes instead. For example:
• A technical requirement to ‘use email’ might be described as an outcome requirement as

‘communicate with users’.
• A technical requirement to ‘check-out and check-in code’ might be described as an
outcome requirement as ‘version control code’.
A key challenge when defining requirements for service components is determining which
features are essential and which are merely beneficial. For example:
• When defining requirements for an incident management tool, an organization might

consider integration with the corporate email system to be essential and integration with
SMS or text messaging systems to be beneficial.
• When defining requirements for a code repository tool, the requirement to ‘check out’
and ‘check in’ code might be deemed essential, and the ability to send notifications when
a code has been changed might be deemed beneficial.
The MoSCoW method is a simple prioritization technique for managing requirements. It allows
stakeholders to explicitly agree on the different priorities. The method covers the requirements
that will not be delivered. This is useful, lists are commonly overpopulated with unnecessary
requirements, such as reports that nobody will need. These requirements increase cost without
adding value.
The MoSCoW acronym stands for:

• Must: The mandatory requirement covering the most important needs.
• Should: The requirements that should be included if possible.
• Could: The requirements that could be included if they do not affect the ‘should’ or ‘must’
requirements.
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• Won’t: Requirements that will not be included this time but may be included in a future
release.
The MoSCoW technique relies on cooperation, and often negotiation, between all relevant
stakeholders. As a result, defining and prioritizing requirements is often a complex and
emotionally-charged exercise.
b) Sourcing options
Sourcing is essentially the process of identifying and assessing potential suppliers or partners and
then selecting and engaging with an appropriate supplier who offers the best value for products
or services. Sourcing as a strategy enables an organization to acquire products or services which
it requires to satisfy customer needs. A sourcing model is a component of an overall sourcing
strategy. It describes topics such as:
• the conditions under which the organization will source service components or a specific
type of component
• the roles and responsibilities of the vendor
• the degree of oversight that the organization requires over the vendor resources
• vendor assessment criteria, such as
o service levels, warranties, and guarantees
o geographic coverage
o time to deliver.
• general management policies, such as:
o payment terms
o use of preferred suppliers and an exception management process
o use of RFI, RFQ, or RFP techniques
o standard terms & conditions when engaging with vendors.
• financial management policies, such as:
o capitalization payments made for service components
o acceptable price ranges or pricing models
o tax reporting.
There may be many sourcing models in an organization which reflect factors such as:
• line of business
• budget accountability
• type of service component (that is, there may be a model to source contractors, another
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to source computing equipment, another to source infrastructure, and so on)
• reporting, auditing, and compliance requirements.
Common sourcing models include:
1. Insourcing: Where the organization’s existing resources are leveraged to create, deliver,
and support service components.
2. Outsourcing: Where the organization transfers the responsibility for the delivery of
specific outputs, outcomes, functions, or entire products or services to a vendor; for
example:
• A local data centre vendor is used to provide computing and storage resources.
• A recruitment agency is used to source candidates for open roles or find contractors
Outsourcing models can be further subdivided based on where vendors or their resources are
located. This categorization might not apply when describing many technology vendors or
providers of cloud computing services (infrastructure-as-a-service, software-as-a-service, etc.)
because the physical location of vendor resources is not always publicized. There are three
categories of vendor location:
• Onshoring: Vendors are in the same country.

• Nearshoring: Vendors are located a different country or continent, but there is a minimal
difference in time zone; for example, a UK-based organization using a vendor in the
European Union.
• Offshoring: Vendors are located in a different country or continent, often several time
zones away from the organization; for example, a US-based organization using a vendor
in India.
When outsourcing work, organizational resources that remain after work has been shifted to
the vendor is referred to as the ‘retained organization’.
c) Service integration and management (SIAM)
Service integration and management refers to an approach whereby organizations manage and
integrate multiple suppliers in a value stream: a new challenge for outsourced services and
suppliers where the end-to-end ownership and coordination of various third-party suppliers are
managed by a single entity.
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Service integration and management can be delivered using different models, although the basic
concept, that the delivery of outsourced products and services is managed by a single entity,
regardless of the number of vendors, remains the same.
Service integration and management models
There are four main models in this area; organizations must consider which is the best model for
them in order to transition to a more coordinated service-supplier landscape.
Retained organization as service

integration and management
Where the retained organization
manages all vendors and
coordinates the service integration
and management function itself.
Single supplier Where the vendor

provides all services as well as the
service integration and
management function.
Service guardian Where a vendor

provides the service integration
and management function and one
or more delivery functions in
addition to managing other
vendors.
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Separate service integrator Where a

vendor provides the service
integration and management
function and manages all the other
suppliers, even though the vendor
does not deliver any services to the
organization.
Service integration and management is becoming increasingly important. This is due to a variety
of factors, including:
• Vendors increasingly specialize in niche areas, which has led to an increased number of
vendors working with a single typical organization.
• The commodification of some types of service components means that vendors can be
regularly replaced by other vendors to leverage better pricing or service experience.
• The increasing complexity of technology products and services means using multiple
vendors to support the organization.
If an organization chooses to use a service integration and management approach, it should

champion the approach as a strategic imperative and look to tender service integration and
management contracts separately from individual vendor contracts. A clear organizational
structure, with an appropriate governance and management model, is also required to
implement this approach.
Service integration and management considerations
Some important aspects of a service integration and management approach to consider are:
• whether the organization is mature and capable enough to run or work in a service
integration and management model
• which metrics are appropriate to measure and incentivize:
o quality of service delivery
o quality of outcomes that require coordination and collaboration across multiple
vendors
o transparency, coordination, and collaboration between vendors and the service
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integration and management function.
• how the use of multiple vendors changes the design and measurement of service level
agreements
• how service level agreements will influence behaviours amongst different vendors
• how vendors will be incentivized (or penalized) to align with organizational outcomes
• which vendor selection criteria are appropriate in this approach?
• whether services will be delivered by a single supplier or require collaboration between
vendors
• how service management practices will change as a result of service integration and
management; some of the more-impacted practices include:
o knowledge management
o incident management
o service desk
o problem management
o change management
o service request management
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Glossary of Terms
TERM Details
Highly-advanced automation that demonstrates capabilities of
general reasoning, learning, and human-like intelligence; a
Artificial branch of computer science and engineering focused on
intelligence simulating intelligent behaviour in computer systems
The use of very large volumes of structured and unstructured
Big data data from a variety of sources to gain new insights
The justification for an organizational activity (such as a project),
Business which typically details timescales, costs, benefits and risks, and
case against which continuing viability is periodically tested
An integrated set of techniques and tools used to merge
developers' code, build and test the resulting software, and
CI/CD package it so that it is ready for deployment
The process through which a person works with others to create
or achieve a common goal or product. From a business
perspective, collaboration is a practice where individuals work
Collaboration together to achieve a common, shared goal/objective
Cooperation Working with others to achieve shared goals/objectives
The complete end-to-end experience that service consumers
have with one or more service providers and/or their products
Customer through the touchpoints and service interactions with these
journey service providers
Information that has been translated into a form that is efficient
Data for movement or processing
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A branch of data science focused on analysing raw data in order
Data to make conclusions about that information using highly
analytics automated techniques
Design The cognitive and practical processes by which design concepts,
thinking experiences, processes, and systems are developed
A period of time associated with the release of service
components to users and/or with onboarding, when additional
resources are allocated to user support and service operations.
Early life Early life support can also be applied to the onboarding or
support offboarding of users from a service
The construct of information, related to the taxonomy and
Information relationships of data to other data, required to present and share
model content in a meaningful and representative way
ITIL service An operating model for service providers that covers all the key
value chain activities required to effectively manage products and services.
ITIL service
value chain Archetypal steps that an organization takes in the creation of
activity value, as described in the ITIL service value chain
Metrics that report what has already been achieved. Lagging
Lagging indicators appear in SLA reports and may be used to report
indicator historical trends
An applied form of AI based on the principle of systems
Machine responding to data, adapting their actions and outputs as they
learning are continually exposed to more of it
A technique of providing users with the minimum set of
Minimum capabilities to enable rapid assessment and learning. Minimum
viable viable approaches can be applied to products, services, practices,
approach processes, and process outputs
A role responsible for defining user stories and acceptance
criteria, prioritizing user stories in a backlog, clarifying
Product requirements and answering questions from the development
owner team, and assisting with demonstrations to customers
A role is a set of responsibilities, activities, and authorizations
Role granted to a person or team in a specific context
Servant Leadership that is focused on the explicit support of people in
leadership their roles
A common and effective way of managing a complex ecosystem
Service with multiple partners and suppliers, where a separate function
integration of a service integrator is established
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and
management
One or more metrics that define expected or achieved service

Service level quality
Service The totality of a service’s characteristics that are relevant to its
quality ability to satisfy stated and implied needs
An approach to managing work that focuses on moving activities
closer to the source of the work in order to avoid potentially
expensive delays or escalations. In a software development
context, shift-left might be characterised by moving testing
Shift-Left activities closer to (or integrated with) development activities. In
approach a support context, shift-left might be characterized by providing
self-help tools to end-users
Technical The implied cost of additional work (or rework) caused by
debt omitting one or more tasks in order to expedite completion
User The sum of functional and emotional interactions with a service
experience and service provider as perceived by a service user
A technique in Agile software development that uses natural
language to describe desired outcomes and benefits from the
User stories point of view of a specific persona (typically the end user)
A series of steps an organization undertakes to create and deliver
Value stream products and services to consumers
A Lean management technique to visualize the steps needed to
Value stream convert demand into value, used to identify opportunities to
mapping improve
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Sample Test One
The ITIL® 4 Create, Deliver and Support Examination

Sample Paper 1
Question Booklet
Multiple Choice
Examination Duration: 1 hour and 30 minutes
Instructions
1. You should attempt all 40 questions. Each question is worth one mark.
2. There is only one correct answer per question.
3. You need to answer 28 questions correctly to pass the exam.
4. Mark your answers on the answer sheet provided. Use a pencil (NOT pen).
5. You have 1 hour and 30 minutes to complete this exam.
6. This is a ‘closed book’ exam. No material other than the exam paper is allowed.
The Swirl logo™ is a trade mark of AXELOS Limited, used under permission of AXELOS Limited. All rights
reserved
Copyright © AXELOS Limited 2019. Used under permission of AXELOS Limited. All rights reserved.
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1. An organization is designing a value stream to provide user support. People from several
internal and external teams, who will potentially be involved in the value stream, are
discussing its design. The discussion highlighted different opinions on the design of the value
stream. Which statement about the design of the value stream is MOST CORRECT?
A. If an external team is involved in support workflow, the organization should define a
separate value stream for that team’s work
B. Each internal or external team involved in support workflow should have its own separate
value stream for their team’s work
C. A value stream can include steps performed by different internal and external teams
D. A value stream can only include steps performed by different internal teams; external
teams cannot be involved in an organization’s value stream
2. Which is the BEST example of team collaboration?

A. Working with others to achieve individual goals
B. Implementing technology to facilitate communication between team members
C. Working together to achieve a shared organizational objective
D. Aligning the goals and KPIs of all individuals and groups
3. An organization performs many activities related to reactive problem identification. It wants

to put more emphasis on proactive problem identification. Which is an example of an activity
that the organization should focus on?
A. Holding discussions with a software development partner about an ongoing error in a
critical application
B. Examining real-time performance data to understand the locations of bottlenecks causing
capacity-related incidents
C. Examining relationships between service components to determine the cause of a group
of incidents which seem to be related
D. Holding discussions with a hardware supplier to understand the product errors in the next
upgrade
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4. An organization is experiencing delays to incident resolutions because there is a lack of clarity

about escalation paths among support teams. These delays sometimes cause the
organization to lose a lot of money. The organization has decided to investigate the activities
involved in incident resolution, and to produce a flow of activities which are connected from
the time a disruption occurs until a resolution has been identified. Which concept is this an
example of?
A. Organizational structure
B. Collaboration
C. A Value stream
D. Workforce planning
5. Which concept refers to the management of IT delivery and value chains by a single entity
that coordinates the various suppliers?
A. Integration and data sharing
B. Service integration and management
C. CI/CD
D. Organizational structure
6. An organization has noticed that the number of changes which have failed has increased
during the last few months. The feedback from many of the reviews of these changes shows
that some of the relevant stakeholders were not consulted at any time during the
development cycle, during which there have been some formal advisory meetings.
Which approach would BEST help to improve this situation?
A. Establish a change advisory board and have weekly meetings to ensure that all the
stakeholders have the opportunity to contribute to discussions about all the changes
B. Define the stakeholder roles required to be involved in the different types of change, and
review opportunities to invest in automation to reduce the dependency on formal
meetings
C. Publish a calendar of potential changes and allow all possible stakeholders to access the
calendar, so they can decide whether they need to provide input
D. Classify all future changes, except emergency changes, as ‘standard’ pre-approved
changes, so that they can be quickly processed
7. An organization prioritizes incidents as high, medium or low so that it can decide the order of
resolving incidents. The organization always resolves high-priority and medium-priority
incidents before low-priority incidents, which sometimes means that low-priority incidents
are never resolved. The organization has received complaints from users with low-priority
incidents because of the long resolution times. Which is the BEST approach for the
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organization to take to resolve this situation?
A. Close the low-priority incidents for which complaints have been received, and open
complaints records instead
B. Create a separate backlog for each priority, to reduce the complexity of the incidents
assignment and processing
C. Create problem records for the low-priority incidents which have been open for a long
time, to ensure they are escalated to the correct teams
D. Periodically examine the outstanding low-priority incidents and escalate incidents where
necessary
8. An organization's application development team has too much development work for them
to complete. In addition to this, the team members are also frequently asked to help resolve
incidents and assist operations teams by explaining elements of an application's
performance. Which concept would help to overcome the challenge of interruptions to the
application development team's work?
A. Managing work as tickets
B. Build vs buy considerations
C. Service integration and management
D. Workforce planning and management
9. An organization wants to introduce a new service. There are many teams that will contribute
to the design, development and transition of the service. Which approach should the
organization follow when creating a value stream for this new service?
A. Create separate value streams for every project phase, to ensure that each milestone is
achieved in an agile way
B. Create one value stream for the entire project, to enable an end-to-end, holistic vision of
the service
C. Create one value stream for each team, to allow the teams to focus on their different
objectives
D. Create separate value streams for practices, people, tools and suppliers, to ensure that
the 'four dimensions' are considered equally
10. An organization has set up an 'ideas' page on an internal website and is encouraging its
employees to experiment with different working methods when they experience issues that
prevent the achievement of outcomes. Which concept is involved in these changes?
A. Integration and data sharing
B. Advanced analytics
C. Team culture
D. The culture of continual improvement
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11. An organization has allocated budget to an initiative to improve the productivity of staff by
providing a new mobile application. There are no existing designs, but there is a long list of
desired features which has recently been collected from a broad survey of the staff. It will not
be possible to deliver all of the requests in a suitable timeframe. Which approach would be
BEST aligned to the 'design thinking' methodology at this initial ‘empathy’ stage?
A. Host a workshop with a small group of the most experienced members of staff to
prioritize the desired features
B. Identify a minimum viable product and build a prototype, then trial it with a small group
of staff members
C. Visit and observe a varied selection of staff members to understand their concerns and
issues
D. Survey the entire group of staff members and ask them to prioritize the desired features
12. When verifying that an incident has been resolved, which is an example of value as perceived
by a user?
A. An incident resolved within the target SLA time, enabling efficient use of service desk
resources
B. An accurate and complete incident record, enabling subsequent trend analysis of
incidents
C. A quick restoration of an electronic payment system, enabling customers to be served
with minimal disruption
D. A better understanding of a complex networking scenario, enabling the creation of a new
knowledge article
13. Which concept is concerned with creating good working relationships with other people by
considering their intellectual and emotional needs?
A. Employee satisfaction measurement
B. The value of positive communications
C. Organizational structure
D. Automated interactions
14. An organization uses escalation procedures as part of its ‘incident management’ practice.
Each incident follows a defined escalation path. If the initial resolution group is unable to
diagnose or resolve the incident, then it is transferred to a new resolution group. The initial
resolution group is not aware of the workload that the new resolution group has. Users have
complained that incidents take a long time to resolve when they are escalated. Which
approach or concept would BEST help to resolve this situation?
A. Service integration and management
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B. Machine learning
C. Advanced analytics
D. Managing work as tickets
15. What technology is PRIMARILY used to examine and transform data in order to make
predictions and generate recommendations?
A. Robotic process automation
B. Advanced analytics
C. CI/CD
D. Integrated service management toolsets
16. An organization has reviewed the way it assesses the performance of its internal IT teams. It
has decided that the IT teams need to be more focused on customers, and it has assigned the
teams new targets to reflect this change. For example, the IT teams now have targets relating
to the business impact caused by IT failures, and customer satisfaction with the IT teams'
work and behaviour. Which approach is being demonstrated by these examples?
A. Service integration and management
B. Managing work as tickets
C. Results-based measuring and reporting
D. Prioritization and demand management
17. Which sourcing model involves an organization using its own staff and infrastructure?
A. Nearshoring
B. Onshoring
C. Offshoring
D. Insourcing
18. An organization has undergone an audit to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of its
practices. The audit findings state that the organization wastes a lot of time and effort in
resolving incidents when the solution is known to another team. The organization does not
ensure that lessons learned from employees, who are leaving the business soon, are
transitioned to other employees. The audit also found that the same types of mistakes
regularly occur. Which ITIL practice would help the organization to overcome these issues?
A. Knowledge management
B. Release management
C. Service validation and testing
D. Service level management
19. Which is a key aspect of collaboration and workflow?
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A. Understanding the complexity of data to assess if it will add value
B. Ensuring that interactions are designed with an understanding of the human behaviour
involved in each step
C. Deciding on a model which can help an organization to manage and control its suppliers
D. Designing surveys to baseline employee satisfaction and identify actions for improvement
20. Which TWO are the possible sources of demand for a value stream to restore a live service?
1) Someone is unable to log into their user account for the service
2) A monitoring tool detects a service failure
3) The service desk calls a user to provide a status update for an incident
4) A user provides feedback to the incident manager when an incident is closed
A. 1 and 2
B. 2 and 3
C. 3 and 4
D. 1 and 4
21. What provides value to an organization by ensuring that there is end-to-end management for
the organization's suppliers through a single entity?
A. Workforce planning and management
B. Shift-left
C. Integration and data sharing
D. Service integration and management
22. Under which circumstances should an organization build, instead of buy, software?
A. When the organization needs the software to be ready to use quickly
B. When commercially available software applications are highly commodified
C. When the solution is not commercially available and the organization has internal
resources which can be applied to provide a quantifiable competitive advantage
D. When the software isn't necessary to execute the organization's strategy or to maintain
the organization's competitive advantage
23. What is a challenge when applying a 'shift-left' approach?

A. Persuading service desk staff to escalate incidents to 2nd-line support teams
B. Ensuring that staff have the necessary skills to perform the new activities given to them
C. Moving testing activities to later stages in the pipeline
D. Increasing the variety of tasks and projects for all team members
24. Which competency profile is required by an individual who has been asked to motivate others
to adopt the new ways of working required to support the organization's goals?
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A. Administrator
B. Leader
C. Coordinator/communicator
D. Technical expert
25. An organization is struggling to respond to and resolve incidents in accordance with business
needs and expectations. High-priority incidents are often ignored because low-priority
incidents can be easier and quicker to solve. What would MOST improve this situation?
A. A triage system
B. A CI/CD pipeline
C. Service Integration and management
D. Deep learning
26. Which concept helps organizations to understand the structure of, and relationships
between, their business and technology services?
A. Swarming
B. An information model
C. Shift-left
D. Integration and data sharing
27. Which step in building a 'shift-left' approach involves the activities of communicating the
benefits to stakeholders, and sharing the approach with them?
A. Identify shift-left opportunities and goals
B. Clarify the costs and benefits of improvement
C. Set up the improvement initiative
D. Set targets
28. An organization has released a major upgrade to one of its applications and is experiencing
large volumes of incidents as a result. Which is an example of how the 'service desk' practice
could contribute to the value stream for supporting the incidents?
A. Developing solutions to incidents that relate to this upgrade and might occur again
B. Communicating with users to update them on the status of incidents which they have
raised
C. Performing trend analysis on the incidents to understand which type occurs most
frequently
D. Creating an early life support team to focus on the issues caused by the upgrade
29. An organization has decided to move some of its testing activities to earlier phases in the
software development lifecycle. Which concept has the organization applied?
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A. Shift-left
B. Robotic process automation
C. Service integration and management
D. Integration and data sharing
30. An organization that has a hierarchical structure is reviewing its project management practice
and is considering the various ways to introduce a new or changed service. Which is an
advantage of an agile approach in this situation?
A. The focus on increasing speed to market and making changes that align to business
objectives
B. The option of using industry-standard models for project management to deliver a
phased, predictable project
C. The focus on a clear release date which the various work streams can be aligned to
D. The ability to maintain its current structure which would speed up decision-making
31. What does the performance of a supervised machine-learning system depend on?
A. The quality of output data
B. The quality of training
C. Neural networks
D. Dynamic baselining
32. Which statement about employee surveys is CORRECT?

A. They are intended to be conducted across an entire organization
B. They are typically conducted annually
C. They are conducted at several levels formally and informally
D. They can only be conducted electronically so have limited application
33. A start-up organization has introduced new ways of working in its projects. Project team
members are now encouraged to give feedback on actions rather than people to establish a
‘no-blame’ culture, and to ensure that communication is honest and respectful. Which
concept has been applied by the start-up?
A. Workforce talent and management
B. Collaboration
C. Shift-left
D. Employee satisfaction management
34. An organization has development teams which respond to requests for change to their
applications. The requests have a range of urgency levels. The development teams have
realized that low-priority requests take a very long time to be resolved because there are
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always higher-priority requests. Which concept would BEST help to address this situation?
A. Team culture and differences
B. Prioritizing work
C. 'Build vs buy' considerations
D. Advanced analytics
35. An organization wants to ensure that the introduction of new services is as smooth as
possible. Some of the key activities it has identified are: educating support teams with lessons
from development and testing; preparing self-service knowledge articles for users; and
making development team members available in case there are any issues immediately after
go-live. Which practice is the MOST important for these activities?
A. Release management
B. Software development and management
C. Deployment management
D. Service design
36. An organization would like to apply the 'focus on value' guiding principle to the 'service level
management' practice. Which is the BEST way to do this?
A. Create concise SLAs which can be easily measured and reported
B. Understand how users interact with the service and how this contributes to achieving
their goals
C. Create awareness of expected service levels with the users, including the reasons behind
them
D. Use the current measurements as a baseline which SLAs can be developed from
37. An organization uses internal and external development teams that collaborate effectively to
produce new and upgraded services. When the changes are released, users complain that the
service desk staff are often not aware of the changes, and that any support issues relating to
the changes take a long time to resolve. What would prevent this situation from occurring in
the future?
A. Outsource the organization's internal support provision to the external development
organization
B. Introduce a self-service system for users so that they do not have to rely on the support
teams
C. During the development phase, engage the support staff who are involved in the value
stream for the service
D. Allow users direct access to second-line support teams by bypassing the service desk
38. An organization is reviewing the way it handles its requirements for new projects. Which is
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an example of an 'outside in' approach?
A. Understanding how suppliers will be used to deliver new or changed services, and ensure
that their services are the foundation for the project
B. Understanding the customer's view of the new or changed services, and tracking project
deliverables against customer requirements
C. Understanding the impact of the new or changed service on the internal technical teams,
to ensure they are able to deliver against the new requirements
D. Understanding the functional structures and work according to the organization’s
capability to deliver to the new requirements
39. An organization releases service upgrades in response to changing market demand. The
market demand needs to be fulfilled quickly to capture market value. Some members of the
product team believe that some tests can be skipped because of the need to release quickly.
Other team members believe that everything should be tested carefully, therefore they have
proposed increasing the number and scope of tests. Which is the BEST approach to resolve
this situation?
A. Limit testing to the minimum required for compliance, and allocate resources for solving
incidents that might follow releases
B. Increase the frequency and strength of testing, and delay releases if necessary for tests
to be completed
C. Review the testing strategy, considering the probability and impact of failures to define
what should be tested
D. Review the release plans to ensure there is enough time for detailed testing, especially
for complex systems
40. An organization has automated most of its activities to create and change its products and
services, but it still has a final manual check before releasing software to the live
environment. Which approach is this an example of?
A. Continuous integration
B. Continuous delivery
C. Continuous deployment
D. Service validation and testing
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Sample Test Answers
Question # Answer Question # Answer

1 C 21 D
2 C 22 C
3 D 23 B
4 C 24 B
5 B 25 A
6 B 26 B
7 D 27 C
8 A 28 B
9 B 29 A
10 D 30 A
11 C 31 B
12 C 32 C
13 B 33 B
14 D 34 B
15 B 35 A
16 C 36 B
17 D 37 C
18 A 38 B
19 B 39 C
20 A 40 B
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ITIL 4 Create Deliver Support Course

Ducis Management Consulting Private Limited

Ducis Management Consulting Private Limited, (Ducisgroup) is officially authorized as an

1. Plan & Build a Service Value Stream for CDS .............................................................................. 19

2. Contribution of ITIL Practices in CDS .......................................................................................... 75

3 Creating, Delivering & Supporting Services ............................................................................... 131

Glossary of Terms ....................................................................................................................... 149

ITIL 4 Certification Scheme

• to provide the candidate with an understanding on how to integrate different value

The target audience for this qualification is:

• individuals continuing their journey in service management

a) Integrated service management toolsets

a) Managing queues and backlogs

Students are requested to share with the class:

To be successful in the provision of IT and digitally-enabled products and services, it is important

About the Certification examination

Duration Maximum 90 Minutes for all candidates

Pre-requisite The Pre-requisite is ITIL 4 Foundation Certificate

ITIL 4 Foundation Brief Re-Cap

The ITIL service value system

The core components of the ITIL SVS are:

• the ITIL service value chain

The ITIL service value chain

The ITIL practices

The ITIL guiding principles

Continual improvement is a recurring organizational activity performed at all levels to ensure

The four dimensions’ model

1.1 Concepts and challenges

• Functional: These are typically hierarchical arrangements of lines of authority or technical

• Hierarchical, formal lines of authority, determine power,

• Removes decision making barriers, enabling fast decisions

• Challenging to maintain as organization grows

Servant leadership: Leadership that is focused on explicit support of people in their

Servant leadership is based on 2 key principles - that managers are:

Collaboration is ‘the action of working with someone to produce or create

Aligning to type of work

• An algorithmic task involves a person following a defined process, driven by a set of

Algorithmic tasks Heuristic work

1. An algorithmic task involves a person following a defined process, driven by a set of

c) Team capabilities, roles, competencies

• Ability to manage and motivate a team

A role is a set of responsibilities, activities and authorizations granted to a person or team,

A job is a position within an organization that is assigned to a specific person.

Business and commercial skills

• Specify, buy, negotiate, manage supplier relationships

Relationship management skills

The other Professional ITSM competencies include

A broad set of competencies can be developed by:

• Specific training - business analysis, programming, ITIL etc.

Professional IT and service management competencies

Competency code Competency profile (activities and skills)

Leader Decision-making, delegating, overseeing other

d) Team culture and differences

• Team members understand how the team contributes to the organization

• Value, quality and operational excellence focus

What does good look team culture look like? It is where:

• People collaborate, share knowledge, and support each other

Cultural fit, what is it?

• People’s beliefs, values and needs match the work environment

What does bad culture look like?

• Many rules and processes

• We need to create and share a vision

What does cultural fit mean and why is it important?