ITIL Service Lifecycle

There are five stages of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). They start with Service Strategy at the core. Once you know what and why you need to do something, you can move to Service Design. The Service Design stage is where you start to meet services with identified business strategies. Once you have designed the services to coincide with objectives, you move into Service Transition. Service Transition is how you move from the conceptual design phase into the implementation stage of actually performing or offering the service. The Service Operation stage is the actual use of the identified and designed service. The last stage, Continual Service Improvement, encompasses all the previous four stages. It’s the stage where you assess and alter services to new goals or outcomes. We all want to be perfect 100% of the time, but reality has taught us that 100% of the time, things change. Business objectives or goals may change, industry may change, needs or wants may change. It’s this stage where those changes get recognition and improvements get made.