ITIL: The ITIL Practices

- A management practice is a set of organizational resources designed for performing work or accomplishing an objective.
- Continual improvement refers to the practice of identifying and improving services, service components, or any other element involved in the efficient and effective management of products and services to align the organization’s practices and services with changing business needs.
- The purpose of the change control practice is to maximize the number of successful IT changes by confirming that risks have been properly measured. The scope of change control is defined by each organization. It will typically include all IT infrastructure, applications, documentation, processes, supplier relationships and anything else that might directly or indirectly impact a product or service.
- The incident management reduces the undesirable impact of incidents by refurbishing normalservice operations as soon as possible. The key activities that are important for resolving incidents efficiently and effectively include:
- Logging and managing incidents
- Agreeing, documenting, and communicating the target resolution times
- Prioritizing the incidents based on an agreed classification
- The purpose of problem management is to minimize the probability and impact of incidents by analyzing actual and possible causes of incidents.

Problem management involves three phases: 
problem identification, problem control, and error control.

- The purpose of the service request management practice is to provide the promised quality of a service by handling all predefined, user-initiated service requests in an effective and comprehensible manner.
- The purpose of the service desk practice is to understand demand for incident resolution and service requests. A service desk acts as the entry point/single point of contact for the IT or service organization.
- The purpose of the service level management practice is to set clear business-based targetsfor service performance, so that the delivery of a service can be properly assessed, monitored, and managed against these targets.