I recently sat the ITIL V3 foundation course and I hate to admit it, but I really enjoyed it. If anyone is looking to do this course, upon initial reading the amount of acronyms and technical terminology can be daunting but please do not be put off.

ITIL refers to 5 core publications:

Service Strategy

Service Design

Service Transition

Service Operation

Continual Service Improvement

The framework begins by recommending how a business should align its strategy to the current market and to identify where the greatest value can be added. ITIL refers to this as Service Strategy and is the main input into the ITIL Service Lifecycle. Service Design takes the customer’s requirements and designs the services, infrastructure, processes and tools to meet these. Service Transition tests and validates the solution prior to being transferred into the customers Live environment. Service Operation is where the customer ‘feels’ the value but is also the area that holds the greatest  risk. ITIL discusses a number of processes and functions to manage these risks  including; Event Management, Incident Management, Problem Management and the Service Desk. The final publication is Continual Service improvement, ITIL stresses that this is not subsequent of Service Operation, rather it takes place throughout the entire Service Lifecycle and keeps the momentum going for the other publications.