The Eight Essential Elements

ITIL FUNCTIONS & PROCESSES - Figure A

As stated above, some ITIL processes are essential to every IT organization because you’re doing them regardless of whether you have an efficient process in place to help you or not. Let’s take stock now of the essential ITIL processes and why they’re essential to IT Service Management success.

If you compare the bullet list that follows to the list of ITIL v3 functions and processes in Figure A you’ll quickly see that, while it’s obvious that some of these processes are clearly essential to ITSM, it is difficult to decide exactly which processes and functions to include because there are many sub-processes in v3. Figure A illustrates the large range of elements that need to be addressed from the v3 perspective.

Leveraging the collective ITIL guidance with an eye toward “first steps” and foundational aspects, here are the eight essential ITSM processes that are required by all IT departments:

1. Service Desk
2. Event Management
3. Problem Management
4. Service Asset & Configuration Management
5. Change Management
6. Incident Management
7. Request Fulfillment
8. Release & Deployment Management

Recent research supports calling these processes out as essential. For example, the IT Process Institute, in its research on Identifying Key Performance Drivers, found seven sets of control practices that predict top levels of performance. From highest to lowest impact, they are:

• Release scheduling and rollback (Release & Deployment Management)
• Process culture
• Pre-release testing (Change Management)
• Process exception management (Incident Management and Problem Management)
• Standardized configuration strategy (Service Asset & Configuration Management)
• Change linkage (Change Management)
• Controlled production access

Looking at these control practices you can see that most of them map closely to five of the ITIL essentials. Process culture is a management initiative and not an ITIL element per se, and therefore is not covered by the essential elements. This leaves Controlled Production Access, which the essential ITIL processes will contribute by highlighting and supporting resolution of various security issues, as well as ensuring that new services are secure. Similarly, the eight ITIL essentials encompass much of what is in the ITIL Service Transition and Service Operation phases, which have been well-quantified in terms of their impact to IT performance.