A few weeks ago, AXELOS announced that they had completed the publication of all of the ITIL 4 practice guides. Yes, each of the 34 individual practices that are part of the new Service Management guidance has its own guide describing the best practice.
For those that are not familiar with ITIL 4 yet, processes and functions have been incorporated into Practices, which are defined as a set of organizational resources designed for performing work or accomplishing an objective. While previous versions of ITIL focused on processes, a practice incorporates the resources that mostly represent the 4 Dimensions of Management of which Value Streams and Processes are only 1 dimension.
See our previous Blog entries for more information on ITIL 4 Practices:
ITIL 3 to 4: From Process to Practice
ITIL 3 to 4: ITIL 4 Practices
The 34 guides are not individual books that you can purchase like ITIL 4 Foundation or ITIL High-Velocity IT. They are PDFs that you can access if you have a My AXELOS account. There are a couple ways to get a My AXELOS account. You can sign up on the AXELOS website at https://www.axelos.com/my-axelos/my-itil#addtobasket or you can get a free year for taking an ITIL 4 certification class from a certified AXELOS training organization such as our partner ITSM Academy.
The completion of the Practice Guides marks an exciting milestone for the rollout of ITIL 4. There were many questions when the original ITIL 4 Foundation book was released in February of 2019, most of which were related to how ITIL 4 practices were different than the ITIL 3 processes. Since the practice guides had not been released the details of the best practice were not truly available. Now we can move forward with implementations and reap the rewards of the best practices.
Additionally, there are several new areas, such as Organizational Change Management and Workforce and Talent Management. The information on these Practices are now available and can be incorporated into your organization’s capabilities.
For more information on ITIL 4, its practices, or to ask about our ITIL Consulting Services, please contact us at info@owlpoint.com or call 888-992-9695.