Understanding Values, Outcomes, Costs and Risks in ITIL 4

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Added by Mark Thomas March 6, 2019

This content is from our ITIL 4 Video Certification Training Course. Start training today!

Providing value through the use of services or, better yet, co‑creating value through the use of services requires a very unique balance of a lot of different ingredients. First, when we’re looking at outcomes, costs, and risks.

Outcomes, Risks and Value:

• Resources, costs and risks can affect the achievement of desired outcomes.
• While helping consumers achieve outcomes, service providers assume some of the associated risks and costs.
• The perceived value of the service relationships should be more positive than negative.

It’s important to understand that resources, costs, and risks, they can affect the achievement of those desired outcomes, what we would like for this service to be able to provide for us.

While we’re helping consumers achieve outcomes, service providers (like us) may assume some of the associated risks and costs. Therefore, that affects the perceived value.

What are we trying to balance here? The first balance is really looking at are we increasing outcomes and the supported outcomes. We’re balancing the cost introduced to the cost removed and, of course, the risks introduced to the risks removed.

If there’s a separation of these and we see a difference, we don’t want to add more risks than are being removed. That’s the idea of how we balance out the co‑creation of that value through that service that we’re providing for our customers.

Services:

A service provider produces outputs that allow customers to achieve outcomes.

Output:

An output is a tangible or intangible deliverable of an activity.

Outcome:

An outcome is a result for a stakeholder enabled by one or more outputs.

Services facilitate these outcomes. Outputs and outcomes are two different things. A service provider produces outputs that allows my consumers to achieve their outcomes.

For example, I was a financial transaction provider for an organization. My core service (output) was a financial transaction for an organization. The (outcome) was their ability to recognize revenue.

The ITIL Courseware book, gives an example of a wedding photographer. The photographer take pictures at a wedding, the output is a tangible photos such as a book of event pictures. The outcome, is the result, a preservation of your memory of that specific event.

That’s the difference between outputs and outcomes.

Mark Thomas – ITIL and COBIT Instructor
ITIL 4 Certification Video Training Course
Interface Technical Training

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