The five broad components of the ITIL Service Lifecycle cover various other sub-categories/aspects, including Demand Management, Capacity Management, Release Management, Incident Management, Event Management, and so on. These are aspects that are meant to cover all areas of ITSM (IT Service Management). Each of the sub-categories/aspects of the five components of the ITIL framework may be labelled either as a ‘Process’ or as a ‘Function’.
ITIL Core Component: Service Strategy
The purpose of Service Strategy is to provide a strategy for the service lifecycle. The strategy should be in sync with the customer’s business objectives as well as to manage services, and therein lies its scope. The objective of Service Strategy is, therefore, to provide a definition of strategy and governance control. The utility and warranty of this component are designed to ensure that the service is fit for purpose and fit for use, respectively. Ensuring this is important as these two components are what add value in the delivery of services to customers.
Financial Management Process: IT Financial Management provides a means of understanding and managing costs and opportunities associated with services in financial terms. It includes three basic activities: Accounting, Budgeting, Charging.
Service Portfolio Management Process: The Service Portfolio is the entire set of services under management by a Service Provider. It consists of three major parts: Service Pipeline, Service Catalog and Retired Services.
Demand Management Process: The Demand Management process is concerned with understanding and influencing customer demand.
Strategy Operations: Strategy Operations ensure that services like fulfilling user requests, resolving service failures, fixing problems as well as carrying out routine operational tasks, are performed efficiently and effectively.
ITIL Core Component: Service Design
The Service Design lifecycle phase is about the design of services and all supporting elements for introduction into the live environment. It represent areas which should be taken into consideration when designing a service. They are: People, Processes, Products, Partners
Service Catalog Management: Service Catalog Management involves management and control of the Service Catalog which contains information about services currently available to customers for use.
Service Level Management: Service Level Management is the process charged with securing and managing agreements between customers and the service provider regarding the levels of performance (utility) and levels of reliability (warranty) associated with specific services.
Availability Management: The Availability Management process is concerned with management and achievement of agreed-upon availability requirements as established in Service Level Agreements
Capacity Management: Capacity Management is concerned with ensuring that cost-effective capacity exists at all times which meets or exceeds the needs of the business as established in Service Level Agreements. It is divided into three major activities: Business Capacity Management, Service Capacity Management and Component Capacity Management
Service Continuity Management: IT Service Continuity Management uses techniques such as Business Impact Analysis (BIA) and Management of Risk (MOR).
IT Security Management: IT Security Management focuses on protection of five basic qualities of information assets: Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability, Authenticity, Non-Repudiation
Supplier Management: Supplier Management is the process charged with obtaining value for money from third-party suppliers. Supplier Management plays a very similar role to that of Service Level Management, but with respect to external suppliers rather than internal suppliers and internal/external customers.
ITIL Core Component: Service Transition
The objective of the Service Transition process is to build and deploy IT services by also making sure that changes to services and Service Management processes are carried out in a coordinated way. In this phase of the lifecycle, the design is built, tested and moved into production to enable the business customer achieve the desired value. This phase addresses managing changes: controlling the assets and configuration items associated with the new and changed systems, service validation, and testing and transition planning to ensure that users, support personnel and the production environment have been prepared for the release to production.
Change Management: The objective of this process activity is to control the lifecycle of all the changes.
Release and Deployment Management: The objective of this process is to plan, schedule and control the movement of releases to test and live environments.
Service Validation and Testing: This ensures that deployed Releases and the resulting services meet customer expectations, and to verify that IT operations is able to support the new service.
Service Asset and Configuration Management: The objective is to maintain information about Configuration Items required to deliver an IT service, including their relationships.
Knowledge Management: The objective is to gather, analyze, store and share knowledge and information within an organization.
ITIL Core Component:Service Operation
Event Management: The objective is to make sure CIs and services are constantly monitored, and to filter and categorize Events in order to decide on appropriate actions.
Incident Management : The objective is to return the IT service to users as quickly as possible.
Request Fulfilment: The objective is to fulfill Service Requests, which in most cases are minor Changes or requests for information.
Access Management: The objective is to grant authorized users the right to use a service, while preventing access to unauthorized users.
Problem Management: The primary objectives of Problem Management are to prevent Incidents from happening, and to minimize the impact of incidents that cannot be prevented.
IT Operations Control: The objective is to monitor and control the IT services and their underlying infrastructure. The process objective of IT Operations Control is to execute day-to-day routine tasks related to the operation of infrastructure components and applications. This includes job scheduling, backup and restore activities, print and output management, and routine maintenance.
Facilities Management: Facilities Management includes all aspects of managing the physical environment, for example power and cooling, building access management, and environmental monitoring.
Application Management: Application Management is responsible for managing applications throughout their lifecycle.
Technical Management: The objective of this is to make sure that IT services are delivered effectively and efficiently. The Service Operation process includes fulfilling user requests, resolving service failures, fixing problems, as well as carrying out routine operational tasks.
ITIL Core Component: Continual Service Improvement (CSI)
The objective of this is to use methods from quality management to learn from past successes and failures. The Continual Service Improvement process aims to continually improve the effectiveness and efficiency of IT processes and services.
Service Review: The objective is to review business services and infrastructure services on a regular basis. The aim of this process is to improve service quality where necessary, and to identify more economical ways of providing a service where possible.
Process Evaluation: The objective is to evaluate processes on a regular basis. This includes identifying areas where the targeted process metrics are not reached, and holding regular benchmarking, audits, maturity assessments and reviews.
CSI Initiatives: The objective is to define specific initiatives aimed at improving services and processes, based on the results of service reviews and process evaluations.
Monitoring of CSI Initiatives: The objective is to verify if improvement initiatives are proceeding according to plan, and to introduce corrective measures where necessary.
