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Added by Mark Thomas November 18, 2013

Overview of the Service Lifecycle in ITIL Foundation

What are some of the main concepts of the Service Lifecycle in the ITIL framework?

The first one is what we called Service Strategy (SS) Governance and Decision-making. Remember, we talked Service Strategy as being one of the initial phases of the Service Lifecycle.

There are some processes in Service Strategy that we’ll cover throughout this course.

Processes like strategy management, financial management for IT services, demand management, service portfolio management, and business relationship management.

Part of the foundation‑level course actually, in the exam, you will only actually be examined against financial management, portfolio management, and business relationship management. Those are the processes that make up Service Strategy.

Some key concepts, such as Utility vs Warrantee. (we’ll talk more about these throughout the course). It’s really all based on that value proposition that we talked about earlier. Governance and decision‑making, what we want to do, who we want to do it for, what value does that provide to our customers within the Service Strategy side.

Next, we have what’s called Service Design (SD).

Service Design is building structure service integrity. I think of this as the blueprinting phase, when we’re designing from a strategic standpoint what we wanted to accomplish.

Now we’re going to the design phase of the Service Lifecycle. So there’s an aspect like what’s the service solution?, what tools are required?, architectures, processes, metrics and measurements, and so on. There are a lot of processes in Service Design such as design coordination and Service Catalog Management, Service Level Management, Capacity and Availability management, Continuity, Information Security and Supplier Management, these are all key processes within Service Design.

We’ll go further into detail of Service Design later on in this course.

Next we put this whole piece together and put it in something called a Service Design Package and then we move it into Service Transition (ST).

Service Transition is the next phase of preparing for and doing the actual changes like Change Management, Service Asset and Configuration Management (SACM), or config.

Other processes to Service Transition(ST) are Knowledge Management, Transition Planning and Support, Release and Deployment Management (the actual build, test and delivery), Service Validation and testing and Change Evaluation.

In the scope of the foundation‑level course from an exam perspective, you’ll be focusing on Change Management, Service Asset and Configuration Management (SACM), Knowledge Management, Transition Planning and Support, and Release and Deployment Management.  These are the key concepts we’ll talk about in the Service Transition portion of this course.

Next we have Service Operation (SO). The change is handed off over to the service operation side, and the service operation, is now running and supporting that service.

Some processes in Service Operation (SO) are Event Management, Incident Management, Problem Management, Request Fulfillment and Access Management.

We also see the introduction of something called Functions or Units of Organization, as a part of the Service Operation, which are supporting that live service as it is today.

Next we have the Continual Service Improvement (CSI).

There’s one process called the 7‑Step Improvement Process, a lot of very neat, very powerful models from an improvement perspective such as the PDCA or the Deming Model.

I want you to notice something, though. Every one of these phases that we have, which includes those processes and the key concepts. They have this central nucleus, this central theme, or this area, this Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS).

IT organizations cannot perform our duties without a means of collecting, storing, having knowledge and information available for recall. That we don’t have to learn the same things over and over again. We call this the Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS).

There’s a lot of details in here. We haven’t covered these yet, these are part of the course. But it’s interesting. I want you to make sure you remember that the SKMS, or Service Knowledge Management System, really is that central glue that holds all these phases in these processes together, so we have consistent information, consistent data, consistent knowledge, and wisdom. We’ll talk about what those components are in a later video.

Those are the main concepts of the Service Life Cycle, so you can see, this is a very big model, very big framework, and we’re going to take this piece‑by‑piece coming up…

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