TThe 4 guiding principles described in ITIL4 as part of the Service Value System guide organizations in the adoption of ITIL. What does that mean concretely?

In fact, an example to understand the benefits of the guiding principles is to see these principles as views to analyze the continual improvement opportunities.

For instance, the member of the Board of an organization are not satisfied with the dashboards they receive from IT as the data are partial and outdated. The continual improvement model defines the steps to address this issue. The guiding principles define the view of analysis for each step.

The guiding principle “focus on value” sets the vision for this improvement initiative as to improve the decision-making process with up-to-date complete dashboards.

The guiding principle “Start where you are” sets the vision for this improvement initiative as to extend the E.T.L processes used to update some dashboards that fit the customers' needs.

The guiding principle “Progress iteratively with feedback” sets the vision for this improvement initiative as the fact that the dashboards include reports for all the members of the Board.

The guiding principle “Collaborate and promote visibility” sets the vision for this improvement initiative as the fact that there is no bottleneck preventing the dashboards to be up-to-date and complete.

The other guiding principles will be covered in a next post.