From the course: Learning ITIL®

Services, ITSM, the four Ps, and the service life cycle - ITIL Tutorial

From the course: Learning ITIL®

Services, ITSM, the four Ps, and the service life cycle

- [Instructor] Let's look at basic ITIL v3 concepts, starting with the first, services and service management, and the four Ps of service management. So, what's the ITIL v3 conception of services and of service management? Here we see that services are how you present yourself and deliver value to your customer, the person or group who pays the bills for your services, and your users, those who use your services. Service management is the discipline of doing that well. Presenting yourself as a set of services to your customers and managing and organizing around services by using service management processes and knowledge, and having people with the right experience, skills, and relationships delivering the value customers and users need through your services. The first ITIL v3 basic concept is the four Ps of implementing IT service management as a practice, people, process, products or technology, and partners or suppliers. You can think of the four Ps as the proper scope of consideration for anything in IT, a project, a change, or a risk, for example. Armed with the four Ps, I'll boldly claim you can add more value to every interaction. Try it in your next meeting. For example, your meeting might be discussing readiness in a move to production of a service, and perhaps most of the discussion is around technical readiness. Tick around the four Ps and you can think through and surface risks in the area of people. For example, do we make sure that we have training for the new service for users? The service desk? How about troubleshooting guides and lists of known bugs? What about the third party partner service desk for mobile professionals, have they been included? This is where the four Ps can help you understand the proper scope of consideration. The second ITIL v3 basic concept is the service lifecycle. ITIL v3 arranges service management processes and functions into a lifecycle from strategy to design to transition to operation, and a continual improvement. While all value is seen and realized by the customer and users in operations, the quality of that value is a function of having the right strategy in the first place, and therefore, the right services and service management capabilities, and in how well services are designed and moved to production, and whether you've got a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement for services and for service management.

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