What Are The 5 Stages Of ITIL?

In today’s world of IT-enabled businesses, ITIL is a vital procedure. It helps IT service desk outsourcing companies provide efficient and uninterrupted support to their clients. The newest version of this IT infrastructure is ITILv4 which ensures cost-effective and quality IT services for all kinds of businesses.

ITIL means Information Technology Infrastructure Library consisting of a set of IT best practices. It formalizes the strategy, design, delivery, and support of outsource service desk companies with maximum efficiency. Besides the infrastructure includes 5 phases and multiple processes and functionalities. This post will explain the 5 stages of ITIL in detail.

The structure of ITIL has five comprehensive stages or types, with each category having multiple subcategories. The subcategories are either a procedure or an operation. Below we have described each of the 5 Stages of the ITIL Structure. The 5 main categories are:

• Service Strategy
• Service Design
• Service Transition
• Service Operation
• Continual Service Improvement

This stage constitutes the foundation for the ITSM structure of an enterprise. It also provides an approach for the following four phases of the ITIL. Besides, it defines the services that the IT service outsourcing company has agreed to deliver.

The primary goal of the Service Strategy is to develop a procedure for the end-to-end service life. It is crucial to ensure that the service life plan and the business plans match each other’s goals.

The importance of this stage is to confirm that the proposed service can meet its purpose and is suitable for the business. Moreover, the service should be designed to provide the best way of delivery to the customers.

The service strategy is composed of four classifications. These are:

• Service Portfolio –
  This category contains the end-to-end services that an IT service provider provides to clients. The primary elements of the portfolio include services in Pipeline, services in progress, and delivered services. The action in portfolio management involves defining, evaluating, and designing the approach to services.
• Demand Management –
  The purpose of this step is to learn about the customer to realize their requirements. The process involves assessing the business of the customers and knowing their expectations from IT service outsourcing companies. It will help service providers to assist their clients competently.
• Financial Management –
  All finance-related activities of the IT outsourcing company are performed within the financial management category. The primary tasks of this step are estimation, allocation, and payment management.
• Strategy Operations –
  This category defines the daily activities of the IT service provider to fulfill the partnership agreement with the client. The tasks include fixing service failures, resolving issues, and completing daily functional work.

As the title refers, this stage is for designing the services based on the strategy developed in the previous phase. It also ensures that the client’s infrastructure is ready for receiving the new services and developing the supporting components accordingly.

The primary goal of the service design phase is to create services as per the client’s business conditions. In this phase, you need to:

• Deliver services to clients and emphasize their significance
• Assure the organization has the capacity and ability to operate the new system
• Monitor the customers’ network protection system throughout the process
• Fill in requirements for any support to complete the new system procedures

The service design has the below subcategories:

• Service Catalog –
  It is a part of the service portfolio that contains the services to deliver to the clients. It is a portal that customers can access to get all service-related information.
• Service Level Management –
  Here you manage and ensure the agreements on service delivery with the client. This step leads to the Service Level Agreements between clients and the service providers.
• Availability –
  In the ITIL structure, availability means the capacity of a procedure. It determines whether the service is capable of fulfilling its operation when needed.
• Capacity –
  Capacity refers to the maximum productiveness of a service. It determines how efficiently a system can meet the agreed-upon performance level. The primary parts of Capacity Management are Business Capacity Management, Service Capacity Management, and Component Capacity Management
• Service Continuity –
  The priority of IT service providers is to provide uninterrupted support throughout the delivery period. So continuous management is a crucial part of It service outsourcing which creates the base for the business continuity strategy.
• IT Security –
  Security Management is a vital part of IT service to ensure confidentiality, integrity, availability, and authenticity in the process. It aims to protect the network and other IT assets from any vulnerability.
• Supplier Management –
  Supplier Management is to engage third-party asset suppliers to ensure the perfect delivery of services. The activities in supplier management include evaluation, negotiations, execution, and terminations of suppliers.

The goal of this stage is to create and implement IT services. It further ensures that any modification in services and Service process is feasible.

In this phase, the service provider completes the service design and testing before moving it into production. Thereafter the client acquires the expected value of service. The service Transition phase conducts 7 processes namely:

• Change Management
• Service Evaluation
• Transition Planning
• Deployment
• Service Validation
• Configuration Management
• Knowledge Management

This phase concentrates on cost-effectively fulfilling end-user’s anticipations. It also analyzes any possible issue in the service. The actions within Service Operations are satisfying user demands, fixing service issues, and conducting regular functional tasks.

The goal of this phase is to learn strategies from quality management to utilize past experiences. It strives to continuously enhance the efficacy and capacity of IT operations and services. Further, it follows the concept of ISO 2000 to ensure constant progress. This phase contains one process, and there are seven steps to complete the process:

• Recognizing improvement techniques
• Determining what to measure
• Collecting data
• Processing data
• Interpreting data
• Utilizing the data to enhance the process

ITIL consists of five primary stages, namely: Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operations, and Continual Service Improvement. Each phase includes multiple processes and functionalities. Each of the stages, processes, and functions combine to enhance efficiency while ensuring constant improvement of services.